🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2oce21$cm8@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>, th9708@meibm8.cen.uiuc.edu (Todd Lee Henderson) writes:
| 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???
| 
| Thanks to anyone that can answer this mystery of nature!

The reason is quite simple: computers express their values by electric 
voltage (either you have it or not: it is 1 or 0). So computers are basicly
working in the binary system, i.e. all numbers are represented by 1s and 0s.
The consequence of this is that nearly all important numbers in computer
architectures are to the power of two: it starts with 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit
or 64 bit Microprocessors or bus-width. Memory usually sells in 4096 bit, 
65536 bit, 262144 bit, or nowadays in 4194304 bytes or even 33554432 bytes quantities. And disks even have 536870912 or 2147483648 bytes.
As you can see easily, especially the larger numbers are quite difficult to memorize exactly.
So somebody must have thought about how to make that easier; and they noticed
that 2^10 = 1024 which is quite close to thousand, a magnitude we are used
to (at least most people in the world who use the metric system :-).
So chosing 1Kbyte as 1024 Bytes looked good to them. It even had the advantage,
that it works equally well if you defined 1Mbyte as 1024 Kbytes and 1 Gbyte
as 1024 Mbytes. Now the above numbers look much better: 256 Kbit or 32 Mbyte
or even 2 Gbytes.

I guess, that's it,

Andreas

-- 
 Andreas Wierse              | Institute for Computerapplications II
                             | Dep. Computersimulation and Visualization
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