– why are there 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte? Why didn’t they make it an even 1000?

Question

– why are there 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte? Why didn’t they make it an even 1000?

In: Technology

Answer 1

2^10 = 1024 (1KB)

2^20 = 1048576 (1MB = 1024KB)

2^30 = 1073741824 (1GB = 1024MB)

etc.

It’s all base2

Answer 2

Me, looking at this, asking if 1024 isn’t even?

Unless you mean round?

In which case, 1024 *is* a round number, just in base 2, not in base 10. It’s 10000000000 when written in binary, or 2^10 .

The bigger question is “why 1024” or more precisely “why 2^10 “? That’s a bigger query I can’t really answer. Personally, I’d have picked 2^8 or 256 as that’s to a power that is itself a round number in binary. Of course, it is quite a bit smaller and so you’d go up the prefixes a lot faster.