this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
890 points (96.8% liked)

memes

10435 readers
3528 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] pHr34kY 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Dude, a "1.44MB" floppy disk was 1.38MiB once formatted (1,474,560 B raw). It's been going on for eternity.

It's inconsistent across time though. 700MB on a CD-R was MiB, but a 4.7GB DVD was not.

RAM has always, without exception, been reported in 1024 B per KB. Inversely, network bandwidth has been 1000 B per KB for every application since the dialup days (and prior).

[–] davidgro 4 points 1 year ago

One thing to point out, The floppy thing isn't due to formatting, the units themselves were screwed up: It's not 1.44 million bytes or 1.44 MiB regardless of formatting - they are 1440 kiB! (Which produces the raw size you gave) which is about 1.406 MiB unformatted.

The reason is because they were doubled from 720 kiB disks*, and the largest standard 5¼ inch disks ("1.2 MB") were doubled from 600 kiB*. I guess it seemed easier or less confusing to the users then double 600k becoming 1.17M.

(* Those smaller sizes were themselves already doubled from earlier sizes. The "1.44 MB" ones are "Double sided double density")