Weekly Classic Computer Trivia Question (20141205)

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Peter Corlett once stated:
> On Fri, Dec 05, 2014 at 06:05:20PM -0500, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
> [...]
> > Assuming that 1 terabyte is 2 ** 40 bytes [...]
> 
> It's not, it's 10**12.  Every other use of SI multipliers are powers-of-ten,
> and computers are not special little snowflakes entitled to be different.

  I started with computers in the 80s, and back then, I learned the
following:

	1K = 2^10
	1M = 2^20
	1G = 2^30

  So that 64K (address space of your typical 8-bit CPU) gave you 65,536 bytes
and 16M (a popular 32-bit CPU at the time came with a 24-bit address space,
as well as a popular upgraded 16-bit CPU) gave you 16,777,216 bytes and no
amount of whining will ever convince me it's 65K and 16.7M of memory.

  -spc (Why yes, computers are special little snowflakes entitled to be
	different ... )