A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems

[Jules Richardson]

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).

This is in a technical work though, with no reason to decimalise things for 
the purpose of marketing statistics. I can't see what the justification is - 
it just leaves the casual user unsure as to whether the author means 64K (as 
in 65536), 65K (as in 65000, and therefore wrong), or 65K (as in slang for 64K :-)

> 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 :-)

For those of us who know hardware, yes the assumption is that the author's 
lying and they really mean 64KB. To a casual user though they may be left 
thinking that the 6502 was somehow different to other contemporary 8-bitters 
that could only address 64KB.

> 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.

Sure, but they're idiots and that's for marketing reasons to sell more product 
;-) In an article such as the Apple one there's simply no good reason that I 
can think of for the author doing it other than them being lazy or a poor 
documenter of the facts.

Actually, elsewhere in the doc they do seem to prefer 'proper' KB - makes me 
wonder if they lifted the 6502 summary from somewhere else rather than writing 
it themselves.

cheers

Jules

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