Clip from: Edupage, 16 March 1999
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COMING TO TERMS WITH BYTES
Computer terminology is becoming more precise: the International
Electrotechnical Commission, which creates standards for electronic
technologies, is adopting new prefixes to describe data values. The new
term "kibibyte" will more accurately describe the number of bytes in a
kilobyte -- rather than being 1,000, as could be inferred by the prefix
"kilo," a kilobyte actually has 1,024 (2 to the 10th power) bytes. The
metric prefixes currently employed -- kilo, mega, giga, etc. --
accumulate as a power of 10, rather than the binary system used in
computer code. Thus, the Commission will use kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi ,
pebi and exbi to express exponentially increasing binary multiples (2 to
the 10th power, 2 to the 20th power, etc.). "There was a need to
straighten this out," says Barry Taylor of the National Institute of
Standards and Technology. (Science 12 Mar 99) [...]
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