Back in the late 80s/early 90s, my dad acquired a PC which ran on the MS-DOS operating system. The darn thing was so expensive that I recall he had to pay for it in many multiple installments. The machine had around 10 or 20 of hard-drive (HD) space and 2 of RAM, which went from being loads of space and loads of memory to being insufficient really quickly. (The reason for should become clear as you read). Mega Something Mega Something Mega Something You probably guessed why it became insufficient: it was all due to games! To get games, I would either need to beg my parents to buy magazines that came with floppy disks or I would get them by copying from friends that also got them the same way. Mind that I had no concept of what piracy was and I had just started to learn English, so there was loads of trial and error to figure out how things worked. I recall getting angry when the games were hard to play (needing good English or being too complex to figure out) or when there were more tools than games on the floppies, which had 1.44 . Mega Something Little did I know then that those tools would eventually help. Megabytes Aren't Gigabytes, Working With What You Have Led by the need to extend the little amount of HD space I had, I began teaching myself how to partition files into chunks so they would fit in floppy disks so I could later uninstall something and re-install the large files back on disk. Although I had to do that often, I always took extra care to ensure everything was always working properly in case someone else needed to use the PC. As time passed, the rest of the family was not using the computer much, probably because I was always on it, so I started taking some liberties. Without fully understanding the risks, I eventually learned about executing a command called (later renamed Drivespace), whose dark magic made the HD suddenly have double the capacity (20 or 40 ). DoubleSpace Mega Something Oh, the Joy!!! I could not believe it! I think I’ve tried it a few times just to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me! And I recall screaming out of happiness. Everything was working fine and the HD had so much more capacity! But that didn't last. Eventually, the system began to have issues, the hard disk started to have bad sectors and there were other errors that came out of nowhere. With no one to ask for help, and as the magazines didn’t point to the command as the culprit, I had to spend several days in front of the computer trying out tools that came with the magazines to recover from Microsoft’s buggy Software to fix the HD. I also had no concept of what compression was, until I read about it in a magazine that came with this cool new utility that made life so much easier: Zip! It reduced my information transfer efforts, but it came a bit too late to save the HD. Those were good days spent on problem-solving, learning, and gaming. Man, did I squeeze the life out of that little hard drive! What is a Megabyte? When I learned it, we had: Bits; Bytes; Kilobytes; Megabytes. There were bigger units in 1991, but I didn't care much about: Gigabytes; Terabytes; Petabytes; Exabytes; Zettabytes; . Yottabytes A , and is, a 0 or a 1 and a has 8 . Historically a would have different values than 8, but I’ve learned it as 8 (dodged that one somewhat, perhaps a topic of interest for another day). Bit was Byte bits Byte And an 8 is called an . A term that unambiguously describes the number of bits in a . Bits Byte octet Byte A 1024 bytes and a HUGE, holding 1024 . Kilobyte was Megabyte was Kilobytes Life was simple, I had no network, all I cared about was having a way to express (the amount of information a device can hold). Or did I? You’ll find out. raw capacity As all my time was spent at the computer, and despite being very young, I became the local boffin (a person with knowledge or a skill considered to be complex) to those that knew me (not that many, I was still a kid). “Why is it 1024 and not 1000 ?” This was a question I would need to respond to often and to which I would happily respond, expert style: “I don’t know, it’s just like that!”. (Boffin no more, right?) Mega Something The fact is, as time passes, this question gets trickier to answer. And to make matters more interesting, the way I learned it is no longer (exactly) valid. Why? Well, we have more than one system. One is based on the while the other is based on the . power of 10 power of 2 Which one we use should depend on what we need to measure and according to who we want to measure, as some multiples of the units are formed with either (power of 10) while others use (power of 2). SI prefixes IEC binary prefixes Let’s look at the following table that splits (power of 10, 0 to 9) with (power of 2, 0 and 1): decimals binary As you can observe in the above table, the and the have the same value, but it changes from there onwards with substantial differences between the values, which identifies its relevance. Bit Byte The larger the unit, the larger the difference, and that’s what makes it important. But it can get confusing. For example, a MAC can be advertised in the Apple store as having a HD with 1 . If you would buy one, then you could go to “System Preferences” > “General” > “About” in Ventura, where you will be able to confirm that it does have the . Terabyte Terabyte However, if you would enquire in the command line using the “df -h” command, then you would get the response in , precisely 932 Gi (not GiB, which it abbreviates; perhaps the author will fix that in the next update). Gibibytes So hold your anger; now you know Apple measures in binary and did not steal almost 10% of the storage capacity you paid for. This happens in a lot of other circumstances too and is not restricted to Apple. So take care when you are buying something or need to be precise, particularly around old Software that may be referring to but naming them . As in those, the may still be equivalent to 1024 and not 1,000. Mebibytes Megabytes Megabyte Kilobytes You may be asking: Why do we need this? To me, it has to do with human needs, in this case, our need for the familiar and for consistency. In the case of they follow the same units as the metre (British English spelling). SI prefixes, If 1 Litre equals 1000 Millilitres and 1 Ton equals 1000 Kilos and a Metre equals 1000 Millimetres, why would a be 1024? Megabyte And this was the feedback I used to get when young, from adults that asked: “Why is it 1024?” In other news, since November 2022, and have been adopted by the and were added to the (the SI I’ve mentioned before), so now we have two more to know. Ronnabytes Quettabytes International Bureau of Weights and Measures International System of Units Yup, they have a lot of Bits! Let’s first observe how many Bits of the units refer to: some However, the precision (and confusion) does not end here. We also have the and . No, I’m not making those up. Megabit Mebibit Megabit and Mebibit, speed (time) matters When you want to refer to the amount of data transferred in a network (or telecommunication systems) as to figure out how fast it is, then you should use or which consider time. Megabits Mebibits, To transfer 1 in a second, you would need a network connection with a transfer rate of 8 per second. Megabyte Megabits Example 1: 1 (8,000,000 ) divided by 1 (1,000,000 ) results in (theoretically) 8 seconds of transfer speed. Megabyte Bits Megabit Bits Example 2: 1 (8,388,608 ) divided by 1 (1,048,576 ) results in the same 8 seconds. Mebibyte Bits Mebibit Bits The , as you probably guessed by now, measures in . Mebibit powers of 2 There you have it! You should now be able to scroll up and replace the with the desired precision. I hope you get them right. Mega Somethings

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