[dspillett]

> The storage industry has pretty much co-opted GB to mean 1000^3 bytes

G has always been 1000^3, M 1000^2, and K 1000, in the storage and communication industries. OS designers, and programmers more generally, started using 1024 instead for convenience, but that came later. The storage industry is doing it right, using the correct meaning of SI units, and programmers co-opted GB to mean 1024^3, it isn't the other way around.

There were times when the storage industry and programmers worked together to really stuff things up and cause further confusion by mixing & matching: the 1.44MB of HD 3.5" floppy disks was actually 1474560 bytes so 1.44*1024*1000.

[pbhjpbhj]

You say M "has always been" 1000000 in your first para, then tell us in the second how it didn't used to be that way.

[dspillett]

OK, had always been until the 90s, and then it was a mistake that wasn't correct by either definition, and only applied to one type of storage not the other types or storage or any forms of non-storage-based data communication. The cock-up this is the naming of 1.44Mb disks (and “720Kb”, and “360Kb” ones before them) doesn't alter that other storage media (hard drives, CD, …) were not counted in what would later be attempted to be disambiguated as MiB.

Even then it was only the marketing portion of the storage industry playing that game, when not talking to the general public floppy disks were referred to by their maximum rated information carrying capacity, 2Mbyte, not their OS-formatted capacity at all.