Month: August 2014

We can often hear the terms bytes, kilobytes, megabytes as memory of computers (RAM or capacities of hard disk). Well, of course, this was during the old days; everything now is at least 1 gigabyte. The term kilo is often associated with 10³ = 1000 (1 kilometer = 1000 meters) and the term mega is often associated with 10⁶ = 1 000 000 (1 megaton = 1 million tons).

However, in reality, numbers in the field of computers use binary digits, so we are actually using the base 2 instead of base 10. Base 10 is the number system that we use every day.

When we say kilobyte in computers, we generally mean 2¹⁰ or 1024 bytes (instead of 10³ bytes) and when we mean 1 megabyte, we really mean (2¹⁰)(2¹⁰) = 2²⁰= 1 048 576 bytes.

To avoid the confusion, new units were introduced in 1998, the kibibytes and mibibytes. One kibibyte is now officially 1024 bytes and 1 mibibyte is equal to 1,048,576. That makes I kilobyte = 1000 bytes and 1 megabyte = 1 000 000 bytes.

The usage of megabyte is still not consistent though. In measuring hard disk space, 10³ x 10³ = 1 000 000 is used. In measuring RAM, 2¹⁰ x 2¹⁰ = 1 048 576 is used. In flash drives and old floppy disks, 2¹⁰ x 10³ = 1 024 000 is used.