this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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That's not a retcon. Manufacturers were super inconsistent with using it, so we standardized the terminology. For floppy disks were advertised as 1.44MB, but have an actual capacity of 1440 KiB, which is 1.47 MB or 1.41 MiB.
The standardization goes back to 1999 when the IEC officially adopted and published that standard.
There was a federal lawsuit on the matter in California in 2020 that agreed with the IEC terminology.
All of this was taken from this Wikipedia article if you'd like to read more. Since we have common usage, standards going back almost 30 years, and a federal US lawsuit all confirming the terminology difference between binary and decimal units, it really doesn't seem like a retcon.
OK, fine, all the world might say whatever it wants, but my units are powers of 2.
I prefer it too, but just because "gibibyte" is a stupid word doesn't mean it's fine to go against standards.
Agreed, but do you pick the de-facto standard of the entire industry (minus storage advertising) or the de joure standard of an outside body that has made a very slight headway into a very resistant industry.
The reality is that people will be confused no matter what you do, but at least less people will be confused if you ignore the mibibyte, because less people have even heard of it
You pick neither, and enforce correct usage of both in advertised products. Tech people will adapt, and non-tech people will be confused regardless (they still confuse megabytes/sec and megabits/sec, and that's an 8x difference).
Agreed, I’d be entirely fine with legal enforcement of the ISO definitions in advertising, no need to air historical dirty laundry outside the profession