21 Jan
1999
21 Jan
'99
3:07 p.m.
On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Megan wrote:
I think the problem with '1.44 Mb' is that IBM
chose to refer to
the exact number of bytes without using the power-of-two term
properly.
For example... on pdp-11s, the virtual address space is always
referred to as 64 Kb... but the actual max (byte) address is
65535. If we were to follow what it appears IBM did, we would
have been referring to 65.5 Kb.
No, a megabyte is not a power of two number. A megabyte = 1,000,000
bytes. So 1.44 megabytes = 1.44 million bytes = roughly 1,440,000 bytes.
So 1.44MB disk drive is not a misnomer.
I've forgotten what the original rant was about but I can't see the
problem.
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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