– why are there 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte? Why didn’t they make it an even 1000?
In: Technology
Computers count in powers of two.
1024 is a round number in computer speak. 1000 is not.
More importantly the way we make memory for computers and connect them to computers means that they tend to come in sizes that are powers of two.
This means that you ended up early on with sizes like 65536 Byte.
You could have simply used the k = 1000 meaning used everywhere else, but that would mean you would either have to round the true number to 65.5k.
However when you use 1KB = 1024 Byte. 65536 Byte are exactly 64KB.
You could be exact and had a short way to write things down at the same time.
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