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by laumars 1821 days ago
1000^n might be more human friendly but computers aren’t decimal machines and a byte isn’t 10bits. 1024^n technically makes sense as a unit for binary machines that have 8bits to a byte.

Everyone was happy with 1024^n convention in the 80s. The problem was HDD manufacturers got greedy and switched to 1000^n to make their drives sound like they had more storage. Thats what started the confusion.
1 comments
slavik81 1821 days ago
RFC 1951 (NTP) was published in 1988 and refers to 56k modems. Does a 56k modem operate at 57344 bits per second or 56000 bits per second? Your claim implies the former, but I'm pretty sure it was always the latter.

> a byte isn’t 10bits

It could be. Historically, the number of bits per byte varied somewhat from machine to machine. Many standards used the term 'octets' to avoid ambiguity.

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laumars 1821 days ago
Historically yes. But even as early as the 60s 8bit was the norm. IIRC C then “standardised” 8bits (though ASCII went some way to doing that prior to C).
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