February 3, 2026
Byte-sized brawl
Kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes
1000 vs 1024: Accusations of hype, nerd rage, and floppy disk folklore
TLDR: The article says a kilobyte should be 1000 bytes, using official decimal prefixes, while binary sizes get their own names like KiB. Commenters split: some accuse storage makers of hype, others defend power-of-two practicality, and historians show this confusion has existed for decades—explaining those “missing” gigabytes.
Internet nerd-dom erupted as a new post declared a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, not 1024. Cue the drama. One camp called out storage companies for playing the numbers game, accusing them of inflating capacities with a friendly round-number glow. Another camp pushed back, saying computers live in powers of two for a reason—and that’s why 1024 became the default. The article name-drops the fix: use IEC binary prefixes like KiB (kibibyte) for 1024 and kB (kilobyte) for 1000, courtesy of the IEC. But the comments? Pure fireworks. A top reply blasted the “1000 crowd” as marketing spin, even comparing it to how screens get measured diagonally (chef’s kiss of snark). A practical voice sighed, “Fine, use kibibytes,” while side-eyeing HDD makers who probably won’t. History buffs rolled in with receipts, citing IBM catalogs from the ‘70s and ‘80s showing this ambiguity isn’t new. The meme moment: “Where’d my 70 GB go?”—a reminder that your computer might show binary sizes while your drive box screams decimal. Then came the lore drop about the oddly named 1.44 MB floppy that’s… not quite a full megabyte. Verdict: the math is clear, the vibes are messy, and everyone’s suddenly fluent in byte politics.
Key Points
- •Under SI conventions, 1 kilobyte (kB) equals 1000 bytes; in computing practice, 1 kilobyte often equals 1024 bytes due to binary addressing.
- •Binary-based units increasingly diverge from decimal units at larger scales (e.g., ~2.4% at kilo, ~10% at tera, ~26.8% at quetta).
- •Storage vendors often advertise capacities using decimal units, while operating systems may display sizes using binary units, causing confusion.
- •The IEC introduced binary prefixes (KiB, MiB, GiB, etc.) to clearly denote powers of 2, while SI prefixes are reserved for powers of 10.
- •Despite IEC guidance, industry inertia persists (e.g., JEDEC, software, Windows), and the binary interpretation remains common in many contexts.