Timeline for How is it possible that they used to type "Mb" when they meant "MB" in printed computer magazines in the 1990s?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
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| Jan 6, 2022 at 17:49 | comment | added | supercat | @I'mwithMonica: The prefixes ki, Mi, etc. are a relatively recent invention, and don't really handle all relevant cases. For example, a common size of floppy disk held 80 tracks on each of two sides, each with 18 sectors of 512 bytes each, i.e. exactly 1,440KiB or 1,474,560 bytes. The fact that these floppies held 1,440KiB caused them to be described as "1.44 meg" floppies despite the fact that using modern terminology their size would be either "1.47456MB" using power-of-ten megs, or "1.40625MiB". | |
| May 4, 2020 at 10:28 | comment | added | I'm with Monica | @Geo... You are, of course, correct. Just that the prefix isn't k, but ki, and not M but Mi, and so on, and so forth... ;) | |
| May 3, 2020 at 13:06 | comment | added | vk5tu | Being from the 80s, at the start of the decade Mb usually did mean megabit. It wasn't uncommon to measure memory in megabits. That was how you purchased memory: a byte-addressable machine of 16KB would have eight 16Kb chips. For larger computers not all computers were byte-addressable, and word sizes varied considerably between models, so if you wanted an idea of the size of memory, then expressing it in megabits was optimal. By the end of the decade the 8-bit byte was firmly established, byte-addressing was the norm apart from supercomputers, so one could then usefully say "megabytes". | |
| May 2, 2020 at 16:04 | comment | added | ssokolow | @Geo... I sympathize, but hard drive manufacturers, like 80s MIDI keyboard manufacturers, love to take any opportunity to be technically correct but deceptive about their numbers, so bytes in multiples of 1000 are too common to do anything but sigh and accommodate. | |
| May 1, 2020 at 22:03 | comment | added | dave | Except when you're seeing how fast the bits go down wires, and then it's k = 1,000, M = 1,000,000. (My first professional programming involved connecting computers to data communications links leased from the GPO) | |
| May 1, 2020 at 16:30 | comment | added | Geo... | I've been programming my whole life, most of it professionally - but I cut my teeth back when this was totally ambiguous to self-taught flunkies like myself. To this day I still transpose Mb for MB and don't even get me started on MiB... Bits and Bytes are measured in multiples of 1024 and anyone that says different is wrong wrong wrong! jk. :-P | |
| May 1, 2020 at 15:39 | history | answered | hobbs | CC BY-SA 4.0 |