A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Thursday 27 July 2006 17:42, Fred Cisin wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> > 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.
>
> IBM does not use 2**20, NOR 10**6 for meg of disk space!
> For a meg of memory, they use 1048576, Mebi, 2**20, but
> for a meg of disk space, they use 1024000, 1000Kibi, 2**10 * 10**3

That was my point, though for anything but "1.2MB", "1.44MB", 
"2.4MB" and "2.88MB" floppies, they don't call 1024000 bytes 1 MB.

A "300MB" IBM hard disk drive does contain (approximately) 300 million 
bytes, not 307.2 million bytes.

Pat
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