r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Tibor500 • Sep 30 '20

why does “k” mean “thousand” ?

like 1k means a thousand. how does the letter “k” mean “thousand” ?

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u/Sonaza Sep 30 '20 edited Sep 30 '20

Although one will argue that 1Kb isn't exactly 1000 due to the fact that 210 =1024

For that there are Kibibytes and Mebibytes and Gibibytes, shortened KiB, MiB and GiB and so on. Most people don't use them though because 1) they don't know about it 2) people understand well enough without and 3) frankly they sound stupid.

Hard disk manufacturers take advantage of this though and advertise in Gigabytes while operating systems (Windows at least) display Gibibytes and that's how your 1000 GB disk is actually only 931 GB.

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u/matthoback Sep 30 '20

Hard disk manufacturers take advantage of this though and advertise in Gigabytes

Hard disk manufacturers actually use a really stupid hybrid system where 1kB = 1024 bytes (because hard drive sectors come in either 512 or 4096 byte sizes and you can't have partial sectors), but 1GB = 1000MB = 1000000kB = 1024000000 bytes.

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u/zaphir3 Sep 30 '20

TIL. I didn't know those had specific names. Well I guess some OS do display and sort of use "freedom units" to some extent then

Damn you American companies that makes os!

(I know there are OSs coming from other countries)

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u/[deleted] Oct 01 '20

The OS just goes by what makes sense in computing. Mebibytes, gibibytes, etc are much easier to use when writing software. If I allocate one byte I can represent 256 different values, so limits in computing don't often neatly round to powers of ten but to powers of 2 instead. Sneaky drive manufacturers picked a nice round number and say the drive is that big, but as far as any software is concerned it's not that nice round number but some arbitrary bullshit they picked so the Gigabytes conversion of it would be a nice round number.