[Coco] kibibyte

Jim Cox jimcox at miba51.com
Tue Aug 14 22:45:04 EDT 2007


Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte

Jim

On Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:31:08 -0400
  "mike delyea" <mdelyea at gmail.com> wrote:
> Has anybody actually used the word kibibyte?  As in "I'm 
>upgrading my coco
> to 512 kibibytes this weekend".  I never heard of the 
>word until I was
> reading about the Tandy 1000 on Wikipedia tonight.
> 
> kibi- (Ki-)
>    a binary prefix meaning 2 to the 10th power = 1024. 
>This prefix, adopted
> by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 
>1998, was supposed to
> replace kilo- for binary applications in computer 
>science. Thus 1024 bytes
> of storage is officially a kibibyte, not a kilobyte. 
>However, computer
> professionals generally dislike this unit (they say it 
>sounds like a cat
> food) so the ambiguity in the size of a kilobyte 
>persists. The prefix is a
> contraction of "kilobinary." The symbol Ki-, rather than 
>ki-, was chosen for
> uniformity with the other binary prefixes (Mi-, Gi-, 
>etc.).
> 
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