Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes
Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes
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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It is really not that difficult. Kilo is always thousand.
1.000 grams = 1 kilogram
1.000 meters = 1 kilometer
Maybe it’s harder for Americans with their fantasy units.
It's because the power of 2 makes more sense to the computer.
This is such a strange post and comment section to me. Computers work because of binary.
which is 2-state, which is why it's powers of 2
which is why we have kibi, mebi, gibi, etc
Which nobody uses in the industry because we all know that storage uses base2 prefixes.
No. Kilo is 1.000/thousand. Kibi is 1.024. it’s just normal SI-units.
Of course it’s hard for Americans that don’t use metric. 😉
It's actually a decimal Vs binary thing.
1000 and 1024 take the same amount of bytes so 1024 makes more sense to a computer.
Nothing to do with metric as computers don't use that. Also not really to do with units.
It has everything to do with the metric system. And you got it exactly the wrong way around.
Kilo is simply an SI-prefix. It's thousand. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte. Let me quote that here: "The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix kilo as a multiplication factor of 1.000; therefore, one kilobyte is 1.000 bytes."
That specifically is where the confusion arises. Someone went and said "oh, computers count in binary so a kilobyte is 1.024." It's not. A kilobyte is 1.000 bytes, because kilo is thousand.
To help fix the confusion, a different prefix was created: kibi which is specifically for powers of 2.
The thing is: for people not using the metric system your argument may have merit. But once you have accepted that metric is superior in literally every way (also why NASA etc all use metric), this confusion just disappears.
It wasn't/isn't. It's nothing to do with Americans. It was (and often still is) because of binary, as the article mentions.
2 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024.
So no, kilo is not always a thousand when dealing with computers.
That's what the blog post is about 😉
Indeed. I only commented, because I don't think such a lengthy post about this is very relevant. It's not hard. Well at least for non-americans. The Americans seem to be very triggered by my comment. :D
why are you the way that you are?
I've honestly just come to the conclusion that being an asshole about the fact that other countries exist is just the continental past time of Europe.
Like, Americans get the most of it but they're like this toward people from other European countries too.