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Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It's about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

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[–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Ok, I understand what you are trying to do, but I that is not how I read it at the time. Prefix to me in this context means e.g., “kilo” in “kilobyte”, and not the “k” in “kB”. I am not sure it is helpful to split the unit symbol up like that.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    In terms of language you are correct. But in terms of SI usage it seems to me OP is expressing it correctly. The SI unit prefixes have a name, a symbol and a multiplier. The prefix is a concept that encompasses all three of those attributes. So "kilo" is one way of identifying the 10^3 unit prefix, but the name kilo is not the prefix itself. It's just the name we use to refer to it. And the symbol k in km is certainly the unit prefix portion of that unit of measure.

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  • [+] [S] -6 points 2 years ago

    But the first part is called prefix even in the standard itself. I wanted to make that distinction because it's not important what the base unit is. By speaking about prefixes instead of the unit as a whole I wanted to make it clear that you can (at least in theory) use any base unit. So everything I said about KiB and kB is also true for Kib and kb and even for kK (kilokelvin) and KiB (kibikelvin) 🤣

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