The "megabyte" discussion

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_freegate.com>
Date: Fri Jan 22 13:55:53 1999

At 11:14 AM 1/22/99 -0800, mostly Fred wrote:
>Every previous time that I have ever ranted about 1.4M, people
>have responded by quoting IBM or the disk box. THIS group responds with
>arithmetic and logic.
>BTW, FDISK.EXE uses 1048576 for Megabyte.

I bought an IBM Deskstar hard disk that was rated at 810 Megabytes and it
had a note inserted into the packaging that had, IIRC, this to say about it:

        Dear Customer,
            The disk you have purchased holds 810,549,248 bytes when it
        is formatted. Some programs will use the value of 1,048,576 bytes
        as the size of a megabyte and will show this disk as having only
        773 "megabytes" of storage, other programs will use 1,024,000 bytes
        as the size of a megabyte and show the disk as having 791 or 792
        megabytes. We don't understand it either, sorry for the confusion.
                        IBM Support

--Chuck
Received on Fri Jan 22 1999 - 13:55:53 GMT