Keys Corner

OK - who knows what a kibibyte is?

No, it is not a new cat food – it is 1024 bytes. You might think that that is a kilobyte and, until 1998, you would have been right.

But several major insititutions, decided that it was nonsense having telecom manufacturers and hard disk manufacturers using the kilo-, mega-, and so on prefixes in line with the SI (International System of Units) definition, which means 1000 , 1000000, etc. and the remaining computer nerds using it to mean the nearest power of two value instead (i.e. 1024 rather than 1000). In 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) came up with new prefixes to denote the power-of-two values: kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, and tebi-, being the most commonly used ones. These new standards were adopted in 1999 by several important organisations, including the IEEE.

(Thanks to Martin Klein, for pointing this out to me.)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2004 at 23:08:10 and is filed under Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.