That reminds me how gigabyte shrunk from 1073741824 bytes to 1000000000 bytes, so you would buy a “500 GB” disk, put it into your computer, where the operating system says it’s actually 466 GB, but whatever.
I don’t think this is an example of definitions changing over time, but just where the same word has always meant two different things in different (closely related) uses. My understanding is that marketers for manufacturers always used the decimal meaning to market drives, while everybody else uses the (slightly larger) binary value
That reminds me how gigabyte shrunk from 1073741824 bytes to 1000000000 bytes, so you would buy a “500 GB” disk, put it into your computer, where the operating system says it’s actually 466 GB, but whatever.
I don’t think this is an example of definitions changing over time, but just where the same word has always meant two different things in different (closely related) uses. My understanding is that marketers for manufacturers always used the decimal meaning to market drives, while everybody else uses the (slightly larger) binary value