Re: why bytes are Bs and not bs

["Ridder, Fred" <F -dot- Ridder -at- DIALOGIC -dot- COM>]

Not quite right, Peter.
The underlying prefixes and abbreviations for orders of magnitude are
part of the International Scientific Vocabulary (ISV).  The metric
system
uses some, but not all, of the ISV prefixes because it is also based on
powers of ten.  As an example of the partial use of the ISV in the
metric
system, consider the fact that 1 million grams is always referred to as
1000 kilograms and not as "1 megagram".

But one real important point that many posters on this thread seem
to be overlooking is that "kilo", "mega", and "giga" (and "tera", which
is the next multiple up from "giga") as used in relation to computers
are *not the same thing* as the scientific prefixes.  The scientific
prefixes refer to powers of 10^3 (1000), while the computer prefixes
refer to powers of 2^10 (1024).  The actual magnitudes represented
by the computer prefixes are *close to* those of the scientific prefixes
(2.4% difference for "kilo", but compounding for larger multipliers),
but they are emphatically *not* identical.

Fred Ridder  (f -dot- ridder -at- dialogic -dot- com)
Senior Technical Writer
Dialogic Corporation, Parsippany, NJ

And to keep our marketing people happy:
Get the Dialogic Edge at:  http://www.dialogic.com


>-----Original Message-----
>From:  Peter Brown [SMTP:pbrown -at- MKS -dot- COM]
>Sent:  Monday, June 09, 1997 10:50 AM
>Subject:       Re: why bytes are Bs and not bs
>
>Miss Julie A Landry wrote:
>> If they are true abbreviations, why don't you end them with periods?
>> Okay, okay, I get the gist of the question. If a centimeter is cm, why
>> isn't megabyte always mb? I dunno, but most places I've worked preferred
>> MB. (It was listed that way in the IBM dictionary of computer terms, too.)
>
>It's called the metric system, which is the standard used in the
>scientific community, and therefore the computer scientific community.
>'m' means 'milli', and 'M' means 'mega'.
>
>--
>---------------------------------------------------------------
>"Opinions? I've had a few. But then again, too few to mention."
>Peter Brown, Technical Writer (pbrown -at- mks -dot- com)
>Mortice Kern Systems Inc. (http://www.mks.com)
>

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