Weekly Classic Computer Trivia Question (20141205)

[Fred Cisin]

On Sat, 6 Dec 2014, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> I should actually do my math before commenting. :-)
> It just happens, that by a funny accident, 1440*1024 is actually 1,474,560.
>
> But still. The actual size of the floppy wasn't decided because you
> pulled out 1440*1024, but because of the format of the darn thing.
> 1.44MB is just the closest "nice" number you can come up with after the
> fact as a way to talk about the capacity of the thing.
>
> It is not an exact number, but they seldom are, when we talk about
> storage. People like to round things off, to make it easier to talk about.

It is NOT a "nice" number.
Honest numbers would be either 1.47 or 1.4
There is no legitimate way to come up with 1.44 unless you cheat and MIX
powers of 10 and powers of 2.