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Comment by themerone | Hacker News Reader

I have to disagree. Computers measure storage in base 2, this is why it is people's expectation.

Marketers measure in base 10 because it lets them inflate the stated capacity in a way that isn't legally fraudulent.

Computers access things in powers of 2 because we settled on a byte being 8 bits. We then proceeded to doing things in even multiple of bytes. A cache line, row in DRAM, registers, and a page of memory in your MMU are all some even multiple of bytes. And back in the day when we couldn't put 300 million transistors on a chip, because the systems work in binary, it was also quite useful to be able to do things like calculate the address of a pixel in the frame buffer by simply shifting the row index and adding the column index, meaning that something like 1024 pixels wide was much simpler to implement than 999 pixels wide.

There's lots of reasons why computers so often use powers of two and thus K being 2^10 instead of 10^3. But the word measure is probably not the best.

>"Computers measure storage in base 2"

What do you mean? 'Computers' don't measure storage, they execute programs. Humans (often programmers) are the ones who want to know about storage.

Those executed programs measure storage.

'Measuring' is a human paradigm.

So is everything else related to computers. Humans made computers. Computers are a human paradigm.

No, many things related to 'computers' are determined by physics and chemistry. In any case, 'computer' is being used loosely (and poorly) here, which is why I have been putting it in single quotes. 'Computer' can mean many things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processor_register#Size

If you look at register size, you'll believe that different processors use different 'bases', depending on whether they're 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit...

And it just happens to be a coincidence those are all powers of 2?

I understand why we use binary, and the implications on processors, but I still think it is wrong to say: "Computers measure storage in base 2"

Almost all numbers inside computers are base 2 (for floats, the exponent and fraction are one such number each).

Base 10 is something that is primarily used for presentation to humans.

We all know this, this is HN....

Fine, the humans that use computers measure storage in base 2. What a pedantic hill to die on.

There were also 12, 24, 36 and 48 bit computers. 32 Bit just won because of System/360.

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