TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Re: GB initialism From:Iain Harrison <iharrison -at- SCT -dot- CO -dot- UK> Date:Thu, 3 Oct 1996 11:28:39 GMT
>>
Just a quick question for which I'm sure someone out there will have the answer:
When you abbreviate megabytes or Gigabytes, do you use MB/GB, or Mb/Gb? Could
you provide me with a reference?
<<
AFAIK, the abbreviation for bytes is B and the abbreviation for bits is b
This means that megabyte is MB, gigabyte is GB.
Mb and Gb are nothing like as big.
Sadly, this confusion is sometimes used by marketing to mislead. I saw a
digital ansafone that had 256Kb of RAM. Yes, that's 256K bits, not bytes. It
was terrible!
A similar problem has arisen about billion. As any (UK?) scientist will tell
you, the 'bi' of billion refers to the power of two - ie 1,000,000 ^2, or
1,000,000,000,000. Trillion etc follow the same pattern. For some reason, the
US has taken 'billion' to mean a thousand million, one thousandth of a UK
billion. This has made the term useless for any serious application, because
no-one can be sure what it means.
