I think the biggest mistake there is using SI prefixes (such as kilo, mega, giga, tera) with bytes (or bits) to refer to the power of two near a power of ten in the first place. Had computer people had used other names for 1024 bytes and the like, this confusion between kibibytes and kilobytes could have been avoided. Computer people back then could have come up with a set of base·16 prefixes and used that for measuring data.
Maybe something like 65,536 bytes = 1,0000 (base 16) = 1 myri·byte; 4,294,967,296 bytes = 1,0000,0000 (base 16) = dyri·byte; and so on in groups of four hex digits instead of three decimal digits (16¹² = tryri·byte, 16¹⁶ = tesri·byte, etc). That’s just one system I pulled out of my ass (based on the myriad, and using Greek numbers to count groups of digits), and surely one can come up with a better system.
Anyways, while it’d take me a while to recognize one kilobyte as 1000 bytes and not as 1024 bytes, I think it’s better that ‘kilo’ always means 1000 times something in as many situations as possible.
Everybody knew exactly what kilo mega and giga ment. when drive vendors deliberatly lied on there pdf’s about their drive sizes. Warnings were issued: this drive will not work in a raid as a replacement for same size!!. And everybody was throwing fumes on mailinglists about the bullshit situation.
But money won, as usual.
Source: threw fumes!
Not too sure if they outright lied, but I suppose we can say that they used the change to make their drives seem larger!
That’s why I wished computer people had used a prefix system distinct from the SI ones. If we’re measuring our storage devices in yeetibytes rather than gigabytes, for example, then I suppose there’s less chance that we’ve ended up in this situation.
There is no reason whatsoever to use base 16 for computer storage it is both unconnected to technology and common usage it is worse than either base 2 or 10
I guess? I just pulled that example out of my ass earlier, thinking well, hexadecimal is used heavily in computing, so maybe something with powers of 16 would do just fine.
At any rate, my point is that using a prefix system that is different and easily distinguishable from the metric SI prefixes would have been way better.
They could have easily used base 2 which is actually connected to how the hardware works and just called it something else
