• LordOfTheChia@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Eh, that at least goes back to the days of dial-up (at least).

      56k modem connections were 7k bytes or less.

      The drive thing confused and angered many cause most OSs of the time (and even now) report binary kilobytes (kiB) as kB which technically was incorrect as k is an SI prefix for 1000 (10^3) not the binary unit of 1024 (2^10).

      Really they should have advertised both on the boxes.

      I think Mac OS switched to reporting data in kilobibytes (kiB) vs kB since Mac OS 10.6.

      I remember folks at the time thinking the new update was so efficient it had grown their drive space by 10%!

      • accideath@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        While macOS did indeed primarily switch to KiB, MiB and Gib, it does at times still report storage as KB, MB, GB, etc., however it uses the (correct) 1000B = 1KB

        And afaik, Linux also uses the same (correct) system, at least most of the time.

        The only real outlier is Windows, which still uses the old system with KB = 1024B, some of the time. In certain menus, they do correctly use KiB

        • Eheran@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Please note that kilo is a small k. n, μ, m, k, M, G, T, …

          And yes. A lot of people here get at least one of those wrong.

          • accideath@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            While you are correct, I know no operating system that doesn’t capitalize the K. At the very least not consistently.

              • accideath@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                I guess it’s for consistency. M, G and T are all capital and n, p or μ aren’t relevant for bits and bytes. Makes sense to also capitalize the k.

                Edit: In case of kbps and Mbps, the capitalization is usually correct though…

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Network / signal engineers have always, and are still, operating in bits not bytes. They’ve been doing that when what we understand now as byte was still called an octet and when you send a byte over any network transport it’s probably not going to send eight bits but that plus party, stop, whatnot ask a network engineers.

          • dandu3@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            His speed tests consists of downloading files lol

            Granted, that’s probably a better way of getting the actual attainable speed

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          11 months ago

          Nonsense. It’s a simple continuation of something that has always been around. They would have needed to actively and purposefully changed it. The first company that tried to sell “1 Megabyte/s” instead of “8 Megabits/s” is shooting themselves in the foot because the number is smaller. If it was going to change, you would need everyone to agree at once to correct the numbers the same way.

          Modems were 300 baud, then 1200 baud, then 56.6k baud. ISDN took things to 128k baud, and a T1 was 1.544M baud. Except that sometime around the time things went into tens of k, we started saying “bits” instead of “baud”. In any case, it simply continued with the first DSL and cable modems being around 1 to 10 Mbits. You had to be able to compare it fairly to what came before, and the easiest way to do that is to keep doing what they’ve been doing.

          Ethernet continues to be sold in the same system of measurement, for the same reasons.

          • SpeakinTelnet@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            The first company that tried to sell “1 Megabyte/s” instead of “8 Megabits/s” is shooting themselves in the foot because the number is smaller.

            You’re telling me that what I say is nonsense and you just paraphrase what I said.

            Don’t go thinking engineering has anything to do with what marketing put up on their storefront.

            • frezik@midwest.social
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              11 months ago

              It has plenty to do with engineering, because it was engineering that first decided to measure things this way. Marketing merely continued it.

              • SpeakinTelnet@sh.itjust.works
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                11 months ago

                Which, as you mentioned, they keep because if they didn’t it wouldn’t be a good marketing move, higher number sells more. Even though it doesn’t reflect the modern end user internet experience. They don’t keep it because an engineer prefer that. Marketing will fight tooth and nail to screw us engineers over if it sells better.

    • Knusper@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      Thing is, there’s no rational reason to arbitrarily use groups of 8 bits for transmission over the wire. It’s not just ISPs who use bits, the whole networking industry does it that way.

      • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        To expand on this a bit more, bits are used for data transmission rates because various types of encoding, padding, and parity means that data on the wire isn’t always 8 bits per byte. Dial up modems were very frequently 9 bits per byte (8-n-1 signalling), and for something more modern PCIe uses 8b/10b encoding, which is 10 bits on the line for each 8 bits of actual payload.