🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2oce21$cm8@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>,
Todd Lee Henderson <th9708@meibm8.cen.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>grante@hydro.rosemount.com (Grant Edwards) writes:
>
>>Patrick Torre (torre@crl.com) wrote:
>
>>: >I call it 76 MB.
>
>>: Sorry, 
>
>>: When refering to Disk and Network capacity the convention is that 
>>: 1MB = One Million Bytes NOT 2^20 Bytes.
>
>>: What speed is a 10Mbit Ethernet?,  A 16Mbit Token-Ring?
>>: (16 MHz = 16,000,000 Hz ).
>
>>Wrong.  For disk capacity K is 2^10 and M is 2^20.  For communications
>>the normal base 10 numbers are used: K = 10^3, M = 10^6.
>
>Wrong group for this discussion, but why in the hell did the first CS
>folks redefine kilo and mega?  They are the ones at fault here it would
>seem.  If you were to ask most people that have a knowledge of SI units
>what a kilobyte or megabyte you would probably get 1000 bytes and 10^6
>bytes.  I used to believe this, and I still wonder why it's not so???
>

Because it makes more sense.  Computers deal in powers of 2.  Things like
disks and memory hold nice round numbers, in powers of 2.  (Gosh...you
know you've been hacking too long when you think of a power of 2 as a nice
round number).  For instance I want to say I had 16k of ram on my old 
8 bit...not 16.384k.  If I say the 8086 can address up to 64k per segment, thats
much easier then 65.536k.  And it would have been stupid for them to design
the 8086 to address 64 real k, since 16 bits will hold up to 65536, so you
will be missing out on 1536 k you could easily had.  Perhaps the k and M
prefixes where badly chosen.  Perhaps not.  The fact is, thats the way it is
and thats the way its always been.  k has ALWAYS meant 1024 in terms of disks
and any other binary device (MHz doesn't deal in binary, so its the real
thing.  Hence ethernet being different).  Disk manufacturers are just being
dishonest if they use it otherwise.  

(This probably belongs in alt.folklore.computers)

-- 
-Matt                                                 crosby@cs.colorado.edu
"Hell: just like Florida, but without the crime!"  -Where the Buffalo Roam