All they had to say was that the KiB et. al. were introduced in 1998, and the adoption has been slow.

And not “but a kilobyte can be 1000,” as if it’s an effort issue.

Kudos for getting back. (and closing the tap of "you are wrong" comments :))

You need character to admit that. I bow to you.

Which doesn't make it more correct, of course, even through I strongly believe believe that it is (where appropriate for things like memory sizes). Just saying, it goes much further back than 1984.

That being said, I think the difference between mib and mb is niche for most people

90 mm floppy disks. https://jdebp.uk/FGA/floppy-discs-are-90mm-not-3-and-a-half-...

Which I have taken to calling 1440 KiB – accurate and pretty recognizable at the same time.

> I'm a big fan of binary numbers, but I have to admit that this convention flouts the widely accepted international standards for scientific prefixes.

He also calls it “an important issue” and had written “1000 MB = 1 gigabyte (GB), 1000 GB = 1 terabyte (TB), 1000 TB = 1 petabyte (PB), 1000 PB = 1 exabyte (EB), 1000 EB = 1 zettabyte (ZB), 1000 ZB = 1 yottabyte (YB)” in his MMIX book even before the new binary prefixes became an international standard.

He is merely complaining that the new names for the binary prefixes sound funny (and has his own proposal like “large megabyte” and notation MMB etc), but he's still using the kilo/mega/etc prefixes with decimal meanings.

"I will not sacrifice my dignity. We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds with awkward pronunciations. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done to the kilobyte!"

In fact, they practically say the same exact thing you have said: In a nutshell, base-10 prefixes were used for base-2 numbers, and now it's hard to undo that standard in practice. They didn't say anything about making assumptions. The only difference is that that the author wants to keep trying, and you don't think it's possible? Which is perfectly fine. It's just not as dramatic as your tone implies.

There was always a confusion about whether a kilobyte was 1000 or 1024 bytes. Early diskettes always used 1000, only when the 8 bit home computer era started was the 1024 convention firmly established.

Before that it made no sense to talk about kilo as 1024. Earlier computers measured space in records and words, and I guess you can see how in 1960, no one would use kilo to mean 1024 for a 13 bit computer with 40 byte records. A kiloword was, naturally, 1000 words, so why would a kilobyte be 1024?

1024 bearing near ubiquitous was only the case in the 90s or so - except for drive manufacturing and signal processing. Binary prefixes didn't invent the confusion, they were a partial solution. As you point out, while it's possible to clearly indicate binary prefixes, we have no unambiguous notation for decimal bytes.

Here's my theory. In the beginning, everything was base10. Because humans.

Binary addressing made sense for RAM. Especially since it makes decoding address lines into chip selects (or slabs of core, or whatever) a piece of cake, having chips be a round number in binary made life easier for everyone.

Then early DOS systems (CP/M comes to mind particularly) mapped disk sectors to RAM regions, so to enable this shortcut, disk sectors became RAM-shaped. The 512-byte sector was born. File sizes can be written in bytes, but what actually matters is how many sectors they take up. So file sizing inherited this shortcut.

But these shortcuts never affected "real computers", only the hamstrung crap people were running at home.

So today we have multiple ecosystems. Some born out of real computers, some with a heavy DOS inheritance. Some of us were taught DOS's limitations as truth, and some of us weren't.

Because it never did!

> The author's wishful thinking is falsely presented as fact.

There's good reason why the meanings of SI prefixes aren't set by convention or by common usage or by immemorial tradition, but by the SI. We had several thousand years of setting weights and measures by local and trade tradition and it was a nightmare, which is how we ended up with the SI. It's not a good show for computing to come along and immediately recreate the long and short ton.

They didn't abuse the definitions. It's simply the result of dealing with pins, wires, and bits. For your problems, for example, you won't ever have a system with 1 "MB" of RAM where that's 1,000,000 bytes. The 8086 processor had 20 address lines, 2^20, that's 1,048,576 bytes for 1MB. SI units make no sense for computers.

The only problem is unscrupulous hardware vendors using SI units on computers to sell you less capacity but advertise more.

32 Gb ram chip = 4 GiB of RAM.

It doesn't matter. "kilo" means 1000. People are free to use it wrong if they wish.

No, they already did the opposite with KiB, MiB.

Because most metric decimal units are used for non-computing things. Kilometers, etc. Are you seriously proposing that kilometers should be renamed kitrimeters because you think computing prefixes should take priority over every other domain of science and life?

"I bought a two tib SSD."

"I just want to serve five pibs."

Call me calcitrant, reactionary, or whatever, but I will not say kibibyte out loud. It's a dumb word and I'm not using it. It was a horrible choice.

More like late 60s. In fact, in the 70s and 80s, I remember the storage vendors being excoriated for "lying" by following the SI standard.

There were two proposals to fix things in the late 60s, by Donald Morrison and Donald Knuth. Neither were accepted.

Another article suggesting we just roll over and accept the decimal versions is here:

https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/si-and-binary-prefixes-clearing...

This article helpfully explains that decimal KB has been "standard" since the very late 90s.

But when such an august personality as Donald Knuth declares the proposal DOA, I have no heartburn using binary KB.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news99.html

However it doesn't seem to be divided into sectors at all, more like each track is like a loop of magnetic tape. In that context it makes a bit more sense to use decimal units, measuring in bits per second like for serial comms.

Or maybe there were some extra characters used for ECC? 5 million / 100 / 100 = 500 characters per track, leaves 72 bits over for that purpose if the actual size was 512.

First floppy disks - also from IBM - had 128-byte sectors. IIRC, it was chosen because it was the smallest power of two that could store an 80-column line of text (made standard by IBM punched cards).

Disk controllers need to know how many bytes to read for each sector, and the easiest way to do this is by detecting overflow of an n-bit counter. Comparing with 80 or 100 would take more circuitry.

That's the microcomputer era that has defined the vast majority of our relationship with computers.

IMO, having lived through this era, the only people pushing 1,000 byte kilobytes were storage manufacturers, because it allows them to bump their numbers up.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-03-fi-seaga...

You can get away with those on machines with 64 bit address spaces and TFLOPs of math capacity. You can't on anything older or smaller.

Why do you keep insisting the author is denying something when the author clearly acknowledges every single thing you're complaining about?

Also If you open major Linux distro task managers, you'll be surprised to see that they often show in decimal units when "i" is missing from the prefix. Many utilities often avoid the confusing prefixes "KB", "MB"... and use "KiB", "MiB"...

Adding to your point, it is human nature to create industry- or context-specific units and refuse to play with others.

In the non-metric world, I see examples like: Paper publishing uses points (1/72 inch), metal machinists use thousands of an inch, woodworkers use feet and inches and binary fractions, land surveyors use decimal feet (unusual!), waist circumference is in inches, body height is in feet and inches, but you buy fabric by the yard, airplane altitudes are in hundreds to tens of thousands of feet instead of decimal miles. Crude oil is traded in barrels but gasoline is dispensed in gallons. Everyone thinks their usage of units and numbers is intuitive and optimal, and everyone refuses to change.

In the metric(ish) world, I still see many tensions. The micron is a common alternate name for the micrometre, yet why don't we have a millin or nanon or picon? The solution is to eliminate the micron. I've seen the angstrom (0.1 nm) in spectroscopy and in the discussion of CPU transistor sizes, yet it diverts attention away from the picometre. The bar (100 kPa) is popular in talking about things like tire pressure because it's nearly 1 atmosphere. The mmHg is a unit of pressure that sounds metric but is not; the correct unit is pascal. No one in astronomy uses mega/giga/tera/peta/etc.-metres; instead they use AU and parsec and (thousand, million, billion) light-years. Particle physics use eV/keV/MeV instead of some units around the picojoule.

Having a grab bag of units and domains that don't talk to each other is indeed the natural state of things. To put your foot down and say no, your industry does not get its own special snowflake unit, stop that nonsense and use the standardized unit - that takes real effort to achieve.

no you didn't, that doesn't exist, you bought 2 trillion bytes, 99 billion bytes short

Similarly, the 4104 chip was a "4kb x 1 bit" RAM chip and stored 4096 bits. You'd see this in the whole 41xx series, and beyond.

Example: in 1972, DEC PDP 11/40 handbook [0] said on first page: "16-bit word (two 8-bit bytes), direct addressing of 32K 16-bit words or 64K 8-bit bytes (K = 1024)". Same with Intel - in 1977 [1], they proudly said "Static 1K RAMs" on the first page.

[0] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2005/readings/pdp11-40.pdf

[1] https://deramp.com/downloads/mfe_archive/050-Component%20Spe...

Even worse, the 3.5" HD floppy disk format used a confusing combination of the two. Its true capacity (when formatted as FAT12) is 1,474,560 bytes. Divide that by 1024 and you get 1440KB; divide that by 1000 and you get the oft-quoted (and often printed on the disk itself) "1.44MB", which is inaccurate no matter how you look at it.

Many things acquire domain specific nuanced meaning ..

Yes they did. Kilo- means 1000 in SI/metric. The computer industry decided, "Gee that looks awfully close to 1024. Let's sneakily make it mean 1024 in our context and sell our RAM that way".

> It's simply the result of dealing with pins, wires, and bits. For your problems, for example, you won't ever have a system with 1 "MB" of RAM where that's 1,000,000 bytes.

I'm not disputing that. I'm 100% on board with RAM being manufactured and operated in power-of-2 sizes. I have a problem with how these numbers are being marketed and communicated.

> SI units make no sense for computers.

Exactly! Therefore, use IEC 60027 prefixes like kibi-, because they are the ones that reflect the binary nature of computers. Only use SI if you genuinely respect SI definitions.

If you think 32 Gb are binary gibibits, then you've disagreed with Ethernet (e.g. 2.5 Gb/s), Thunderbolt (e.g. 40 Gb/s), and other communication standards.

That's why I keep hammering on the same point: Creating context-dependent prefixes sows endless confusion. The only way to stop the confusion is to respect the real definitions.

“Kilo” can mean what we want in different contexts and it’s really no more or less correct as long as both parties understand and are consistent in their usage to each other.

It would be annoying of one frequently found themselves calculating gigabytes per hectare. I don't think I've ever done that. The closest I've seen is measure magnetic tape density where you get weird units like "characters per inch", where neither "character" nor "inch" are the common units for their respective metrics.

“A byte was described as consisting of any number of parallel bits from one to six. Thus a byte was assumed to have a length appropriate for the occasion. Its first use was in the context of the input-output equipment of the 1950s, which handled six bits at a time.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

(The old excuse was that networks are serial but they haven't been serial for decades.)

For SI units, the abbreviations are defined, so a lowercase k for kilo and uppercase M for mega is correct. Lower case m is milli, c is centi, d is deci. Uppercase G is giga, T is tera and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#...

Interestingly, from 10GBit/s, we now also have binary divisions, so 5GBit/s and 2.5GBit/s.

Even at slower speeds, these were traditionally always decimal based - we call it 50bps, 100bps, 150bps, 300bps, 1200bps, 2400bps, 9600bps, 19200bps and then we had the odd one out - 56k (actually 57600bps) where the k means 1024 (approximately), and the first and last common speed to use base 2 kilo. Once you get into MBps it's back to decimal.

RAM had binary sizing for perfectly practical reasons. Nothing else did (until SSDs inherited RAM's architecture).

We apply it to all the wrong things mostly because the first home computers had nothing but RAM, so binary sizing was the only explanation that was ever needed. And 50 years later we're sticking to that story.

I was going to say that what it could address and what they called what it could address is an important distinction, but found this fun ad from 1976[1].

"16K Bytes of RAM Memory, expandable to 60K Bytes", "4K Bytes of ROM/RAM Monitor software", seems pretty unambiguous that you're correct.

Interestingly wikipedia at least implies the IBM System 360 popularized the base-2 prefixes[2], citing their 1964 documentation, but I can't find any use of it in there for the main core storage docs they cite[3]. Amusingly the only use of "kb" I can find in the pdf is for data rate off magnetic tape, which is explicitly defined as "kb = thousands of bytes per second", and the only reference to "kilo-" is for "kilobaud", which would have again been base-10. If we give them the benefit of the doubt on this, presumably it was from later System 360 publications where they would have had enough storage to need prefixes to describe it.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zilog_Z-80_Microproc...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Units_based_on_powers_of_...

[3] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/systemSummary/A22-6810-...

But once hard drives started hitting about a gigabyte was when everyone started noticing and howling.

You have to sort of remember that these didn't exist at the time that "kilobyte" came around. The binary prefixes are — relatively speaking — very new.

I'm happy to say it isn't an SI unit. Kilo meaning 1000 makes no sense for computers, so lets just never use it to mean that.

> Therefore, use IEC 60027 prefixes like kibi-,

No. They're dumb. They sound stupid, they were decades too late, etc. This was a stupid plan. We can define Kilo as 1024 for computers -- we could have done that easily -- and just don't call them SI units if that makes people weird. This is how we all actually work. So rather than be pedantic about it lets make the language and units reflect their actual usage. Easy.

I wonder if there's a wikipedia article listing these...

> All words are made up.

Yes, and the made up words of kilo and kibi were given specific definitions by the people who made them up:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

> […] as long as both parties understand and are consistent in their usage to each other.

And if they don't? What happens then?

Perhaps it would be easier to use the words definitions as they are set up in standards and regulations so context is less of an issue.

* https://xkcd.com/1860/

Just later, some marketing assholes thought they could better sell their hard drives when they lie about the size and weasel out of legal issues with redefining the units.

the same and even more confusion is engendered when talking about "fifths" etc.

I don't know if that's correct, but at least it'd explain the mismatch.

"in binary computing traditionally prefix + byte implied binary number quantities."

There are no bytes involved in Hz or FLOPs.

Good for them. People make up their own definitions for words all the time. Some of those people even try to get others to adopt their definition. Very few are ever successful. Because language is about communicating shared meaning. And there is a great deal of cultural inertia behind the kilo = 2^10 definition in computer science and adjacent fields.

It's also stupid because it's rare than anyone outside of programming even needs to care exactly how many bytes something else. At the scales that each of kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte etc are used, the smaller values are pretty much insignificant details.

If you ask for a kilogram of rice, then you probably care more about that 1kg of rice is the same as the last 1kg of rice you got, you probably wouldn't even care how many grams that is. Similarly, if you order 1 ton of rice, you do care exactly how many grams it is, or do you just care that this 1 ton is the same as that 1 ton?

This whole stupidity started because hard disk manufacturers wanted to make their drives sound bigger than they actually were. At the time, everybody buying hard disks knew about this deception and just put up with it. We'd buy their 2GB drive and think to ourselves, "OK so we have 1.86 real GB". And that was the end of it.

Can you just imagine if manufacturers started advertising computers as having 34.3GB of RAM? Everybody would know it was nonsense and call it 32GB anyway.

It's easy to find some that are marketed as 500GB and have 500x10^9 bytes [0]. But all the NVMe's that I can find that are marketed as 512GB have 512x10^9 bytes[1], neither 500x10^9 bytes nor 2^39 bytes. I cannot find any that are labeled "1TB" and actually have 1 Tebibyte. Even "960GB" enterprise SSD's are measured in base-10 gigabytes[2].

0: https://download.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sh...

1: https://download.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sh...

2: https://image.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sheet...

(Why are these all Samsung? Because I couldn't find any other datasheets that explicitly call out how they define a GB/TB)

Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

E.g. Macs measure file sizes in powers of 10 and call them KB, MB, GB. Windows measures file sizes in powers of 2 and calls them KB, MB, GB instead of KiB, MiB, GiB. Advertised hard drives come in powers of 10. Advertised memory chips come in powers of 2.

When you've got a large amount of data or are allocating an amount of space, are you measuring its size in memory or on disk? On a Mac or on Windows?

What the hell is a "kibibyte"? Sounds like a brand of dog food.

I don't know what the better alternative would have been, but this certainly wasn't it.

1. defined traditional suffixes and abbreviations to mean powers of two, not ten, aligning with most existing usages, but...

2. deprecated their use, especially in formal settings...

3. defined new spelled-out vocabulary for both pow10 and pow2 units, e.g. in English "two megabytes" becomes "two binary megabytes" or "two decimal megabytes", and...

4. defined new unambiguous abbreviations for both decimal and binary units, e.g. "5MB" (traditional) becomes "5bMB" (simplified, binary) or "5dMB" (simplified, decimal)

This way, most people most of the time could keep using the traditional units and be understood just fine, but in formal contexts in which precision is paramount, you'd have a standard way of spelling out exactly what you meant.

I'd have gone one step further too and stipulate that truth in advertising would require storage makers to use "5dMB" or "5 decimal megabytes" or whatever in advertising and specifications if that's what they meant. No cheating using traditional units.

(We could also split bits versus bytes using similar principles, e.g. "bi" vs "by".)

I mean consider UK, which still uses pounds, stone, and miles. In contexts where you'd use those units, writing "10KB" or "one megabyte" would be fine too.

It's leagues better than "kibibyte".

Yeah it sounds dumb, but it’s really not that different from your suggestion.