It all changed when "normal people" started using computers. 1 KB = 1024 bytes makes perfect sense except to 98% of the world.
The argument is that the base10 interval makes no sense with computers, because they're physically base2.
You can't really have 10 without wasting 2, and that's why it made sense to use 1024 instead of 1000.
Personally I feel the pushback against gibi/mibi/kibi overblown. It's ultimately better to be coherent everywhere and always specify everything with decimals/rounded over random context dependent decisions. But still, the original argument for 1024 made sense too.
1 or 8, depending.
Unless you have some well known powers of 2 you have to calculate anyway.
To be able to convert easily from byte to gibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, etc. is a bigger benefit. Just moving the decimal sperator to convert the units is big advantage of the metric system.
Practically, physical objects need built. If you're not doing it yourself you've got to work within the limits of your suppliers or push them.
But, if someone asks me for a good explanation why 1 KB != 1000 bytes, I don't have a good answer. I know about powers of 2, but why are powers of 2 more important than "kilo" meaning 1000 like it does in every other context?
It's like if a kilometer wasn't 1000 meters, because of the way car odometers worked, or the shape of the tires or something. Why would technical details about a car change the meaning of "kilometer"?
> why are powers of 2 more important than "kilo" meaning 1000 like it does in every other context?
Like a lot of arguments, we're arguing over the definition of a word here ("kilobyte"), nothing more. I'm asking why technical details about a computer are so important they can override the generally understood (and well defined) meaning of that word.
Because the technical details about a computer are important when describing its technical characteristics.
In short, context matters, and we adapt the meaning of words by the context they're used in all the time. It's ordinary.
In fact, it's so ordinary in this particular case, that all we humans did it for decades, before a weird group not representing the existing organic consensus came along and decided the terms absolutely must be changed, and presented us with extremely silly-sounding ones to replace the existing ones, that of course few adopted, leading to the situation we have today where the existing terms are used interchangably to mean both things, and there is now a greater ambiguity around them than existed before.
It wasn't perfect before, but the "solution" made it worse.
Therefore, it sucks in practice at meeting its goal, no matter how much sense it may make to the minority that thinks "gibibyte" is something anyone would ever want to say in public, other than in a funny voice to a dog or a baby.
And, whenever pressed for clarification, the oil people admitted "yes, technically our unit should be noted as 'oil barrels' which are different from the normal kind, but we like to just say 'barrels' because it's easier".
Reflexive answer: gold (well obviously gold is heavier than feathers)
Logical answer: neither (1 pound = 1 pound)
Actual trick answer: feathers (precious metals used troy weights instead of the one just about everything else used, and 1 pound in the troy system weighs less than 1 pound in the other one)
These numbers being a power of two seems pretty important, important enough that we redefine words to match powers of 2. Then, when we look at the exact number of bytes, it's not a power of 2.
But come on, are you really saying that 1100 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 bytes of RAM isn't close enough to being a power of two to prove the same point?
Our starting point is that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, but then people say "that's not close enough to 1024, which is a power of 2", and so we redefine the word "kilobyte" to mean 1024, etc. Then I buy a device with a gigabyte and it doesn't have 1,000,000,000 bytes, and it doesn't have exactly 1,073,741,824 (2^30) bytes either, it has some other random number.
So we started with Système International units and a common understanding of what they mean. Computer people said, "that's not close enough, let's redefine standardized words so they will be exact", and then they use those redefined words in an inexact way.
And for the sane normie people, a kilobyte is still 1000 bytes.
Cute.
But no, being a few percent off is very different from saying "it's not a pure factor of two, it's a very small number multiplied by a very large power of two".
Your GPU has an exact multiple of 2^30 bytes of memory.
If you want to talk about a USB drive, then to do that properly we need the size and count of chips inside a real model.
So clearly the right thing to do here to clear up any confusion is to introduce the concept of computer-sized bytes, and metric bytes. Metric bytes would be 0.9765625 of a regular computer byte, so 1000 MB would be 1000 Metric Bytes, or 1024 * 0.9765625 = 1024 Bytes.
Thus hard drives could be rated at 1,000 GMB, for 1,000 giga metric bytes, which would really be a 1 TMB drive or 1 tera metric bytes, which is the same as 1024 giga regular-computer-sized-bytes, or 1024 GRCSB.
Totally straightforwards and not confusing to anybody.
> GMB
Gigamegabytes, perfectly reasonable.
I think you meant 42 gallons.
The alternative, would have been to use something else than kilo, mega ect., that represented the base 2 magnitudes. It would be awkward to say you have 8.306.688 bytes of ram if you need to be exact.
But if you are doing data storage, there are many natural power-of-two structures. Using 1024-based prefixes with them often leads to more convenient numbers.
They never have the opportunity to question the sensibility of one or the other.