27 Jul
2006
27 Jul
'06
2:33 p.m.
On Thursday 27 July 2006 15:37, Jules Richardson wrote:
Antonio Carlini 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.
And, as Mouse, has pointed out, communications speeds are almost always
listed by thousands/millions of bits/bytes per second, not KiB/MiB.
Pat
--
Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org
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.