Megabyte vs Mebibyte (was Re: Language and English)

From: Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
Date: Fri Jan 4 17:39:05 2002

On Jan 4, 10:39, Ethan Dicks wrote:

> Besides the 1000 x 1024 method, the moniker "1.44Mb" has an additional
> marketing advantage - it's a simple multiple of 720K (which is really
> a 1Mb raw floppy, formatted to 737,280 bytes under DOS, or 1024 x 720).
> It's easier to conceptualize that a "1.44Mb" floppy holds twice as much
> as a "720K" floppy. If you called it a "1.47Mb" floppy, I think there
> would be even more confused newbies than there are now.

My nitpick is that it's "MB" (megabytes) not "Mb" (megabits). And *of
course* it's 1.40625MB, or 1.4MB for short :-)

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York
Received on Fri Jan 04 2002 - 17:39:05 GMT

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