this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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147
Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
210 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It's about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

While we're nitpicking, the post says multiple times that SI prefix symbols are "all uppercase except for kilo (k)".

That's just factually wrong. More than half of them are lowercase! There's centi- (c), micro- (µ), nano- (n), etc. On the positive side there's even deca- (da) and hecto- (h), though they aren't particularly common or useful. I did at least see milli- (m) and bit (b) mentioned in a brief note though.

Obviously context matters and only the positive powers from kilo upward are relevant in computer science. But I studied chemistry and physics so I guess it irked me to see the statement repeatedly ignore all the negative powers of ten.

Overall, good rant though 😅 I'll be more careful to use KiB and MiB from here out when appropriate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

❤️ Thank you for taking the time to read it. And thank you so much for pointing that out, you are completely right and I totally didn't think about that while writing the article, probably because negative exponents are pretty rare in computer science (as in milli-bytes, etc.). I'll fix that in a few days. Thanks again for pointing that out.