7 Dec
2014
7 Dec
'14
7:46 p.m.
On 12/07/2014 03:02 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
IMO the mess really started with Apple's Macintosh
which reported memory and
disk capacity using K in a binary sense without any qualification. I can't
prove a negative, but I think no OS prior to the Mac OS used any prefixes at
all; they simply displayed or printed a decimal number to however many
digits necessary, sometimes without commas. It will be interesting to see
what this group recalls
.
Oh, it started before the Mac. Consider, for example, the Technical
Reference for the IBM PC (first edition). Clear as day, it talks about
memory expansion options of "256K". Even so, consider older CP/M
machines--many of them used the memory available in the signon as "XXK"
It probably goes back well into the 60s talking about so many
"kilowords" of memory or mass storage.
--Chuck