Paraprogramming Dispatches

It was the early 1990s. Hard drive manufacturers fought hard for coming up ever larger devices, pushing to the coveted gigabyte boundary. At some point they got enough platter density in consumer grade devices to haul over a billion bytes. There was one problem: the industry convention was that kilo-, mega-, and gigabytes were all power of two units. That made them some 74 million bytes short of the coveted boundary.

Not that it stopped them from advertising their disks as gigabyte devices. Thus the Marketing Megabyte was born.

Engineers were understandably pissed, and consumers eventually started to notice that storing a gigabyte of data as reported by their operating systems on these disks is simply not possible. This culminated in a tangible threat of class action lawsuits. In response the marketers instead of fixing their units made an effort of redefining the units themselves. This was successfully pushed through International Electrotechnical Commission in 1999. However the threat of lawsuits lingered until 2007 when this nonsense was finally adopted by national standard bodies. Marketing Megabyte become the Government Megabyte and engineers were told to walk off to substitution units instead.

So let me sum it up here for the next time this issue inevitably flares on the usual tech aggregator websites:

• Raison d’être for the change was the compulsion to lie to the customers without liability.

• Greek-derived prefixes kilo- and mega- refer to sharp thousand and million respectively. How important it was after decades of established use in the industry however is unclear. To a non-technical user it makes no difference as long as the unit is used consistently. To a computer engineer, Marketing Megabytes are largely unusable. Either way, the proposed substitution acronyms kibi-, mebi- and so on in culmination of circular reasoning still use the same Greek prefixes.

• Binary computers address memory in powers of two. This makes the power of two KB/MB/GB a natural measurement unit. To the day it’s impossible to buy a memory chip with capacity in round number of Marketing Megabytes because it simply doesn’t make sense.

• Marketing Megabyte, while standardized via IEC is still not a SI unit. Which makes sense since byte is not derivable from fundamental units hence International Bureau of Standards has no business managing it. Marketing Megabyte proponents often try to muddy this point by insisting kilo- is a SI prefix (it’s Greek really, see above) but kilobyte is still not a standard SI unit.

• Kibi-, mebi-, and gibi- prefixes sounds patently silly. I have lost count of engineers who either chose to ignore them or can’t say them aloud without embarrassed smile. They could make great cartoon character names though.

tl;dr beating a dead horse