\nThe following is according to my understanding.<\/p>\n
\nWhen I was a kid, computer ideas were measured in Kilobytes, or KB. A computer might have, back then, 5KB of RAM: we called that 5K. By itself, K meant “kilo”, and stood for “thousand.” However, it really stood for 2^10, or 1024. Since 1024 was very close to 1000, being off by just 2.4 percent, people were happy enough to accept the misnomer because of its convenience.<\/p>\n
\nFollowing that custom, MB, or megabyte, was really 1024×1024=1048576 bytes, which was off by about five percent. Once again, “everyone” knew what it meant. In the context of computers, people accepted slightly different definitions of kilo and mega.<\/p>\n
\nYet, today I was changing a disk partition, and the application mentioned MiB. I had to look up what that means: “Mebibyte.” A Mebibyte, it turns out, is truly 2^20 = 1048576 bytes. There is a whole system for literal memory measures: KiB means “Kibibyte,” which is 2^10 = 1024 bytes, for instance. GiB means Gibibytes, truly 2^30 bytes.<\/p>\n
\nIt seems Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, etc. have been around since 1998. I’ve only started noticing them recently, however.<\/p>\n
\nInteresting, eh?<\/p>\n
Source:<\/p>\n
techtarget.com<\/a><\/p>\nJack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane,<\/a> Campbell River, BC.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Self-tutoring about computer science terms: the tutor mentions one he’s noticed. The following is according to …<\/p>\n