wischi, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

That’s just wrong. “Kilo” is ancient Greek for “thousand”. It always meant 1000. Because bytes are grouped on powers of two and because of the pure coincidence that 10^3 (1000) is almost the same size as 2^10 (1024) people colloquially said kilobyte when they meant 1024 bytes, but that was always wrong.

Update: To make it even clearer. Try to think what historical would have happened if instead of binary, most computers would use ternary. Nobody would even think about reusing kilo for 3^6 (=729) or 3^7 (=2187) because they are not even close.

Resuing well established prefixes like kilo was always a stupid idea.