A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems

[Allison]

Dave Dunfield wrote:
>> Although according to the author the 6502 can address 65K, not 64K.
> 
> This is very common, and is based on an assumption of 'k' meaning
> 1000 (decimal), not 1024 - 16 bit bus - 65535 bytes (65 thousand).
> I've seen it in data sheets and other reasonably technically accurate
> material - I guess it depends on your point of view (and how low-level
> your experience is :-)
> 
> Hard drive manufacturers have been doing the same thing with "meg"
> for years - specing in decimal 1,000,000 makes the drive sound bigger
> than specing in 2**20 sized blocks.
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave

For engineers and techs in electronics K=1000 as in 10k resistor (nominally 
10,000 ohms) and Meg=1,000,000  we also have the 10-n value of milli, micro,
nano and pico to name a few and they are all powers of 10.  In 
programming/computer context only do K=1024 and M=1048576.  This leads to
much confusion as a result for those that a marginally technical.  As a result
in documentation I tend to insist that some context help such as K_bytes_ or
Meg_ohms_ be there to keep some sense of If it's powers of 10 or 2.

Whats a millibyte? Saw that once!


Allison