A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Thursday 27 July 2006 15:37, Jules Richardson wrote:
> Antonio Carlini wrote:
> > The SI prefixes (k) kilo and (M) mega have always meant 10**3 and
> > 10**6. The computer industry decided that K should mean 1024 (which
> > is fine if somewhat confusing)
>
> It's not confusing - or at least it never used to be. In a computing
> context K was always a power of 2 because in that environment that's
> what's more convenient, and in any other context it meant a power of
> 10. The only confusion arose when some total muppet [1] decided that
> *also* using powers of ten in a computer context was a brilliant
> idea.

IBM has been rating hard drives in millions (or thousands perhaps) of 
characters since they started making them.  "MB" meaning "Million 
bytes" for magnetic storage media is hardly a new thing, from what I 
can determine.

Not that they've been consistent either... "360kB" through "1.44MB" 
floppies, for instance.

And, as Mouse, has pointed out, communications speeds are almost always 
listed by thousands/millions of bits/bytes per second, not KiB/MiB.

Pat
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