For American numbers

[Ruud de Jong]

Dan Bishop schreef:
> Nick Craig-Wood wrote:
> 
>>Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Only for hard drive manufacturers, perhaps.
>>>
>>> For the rest of the computer world, unless I've missed
>>> a changing of the guard or something, "kilo" is 1024
>>> and "mega" is 1024*1024 and so forth...
>>
>>Yes.  Unless you work in the telcoms industry, where, for example if
>>you order a 2 Mbit/s line you'll get
>>
>>  2 * 1024 * 1000 bits / s
> 
> 
> They must have gotten the idea from floppy disks, which also use a
> 1024000-byte "megabyte".
> 

Not really. It is actually related to the bandwidth of individual
telephony speech connections. These channels have a bandwith
of 64 kb/sec, where the k-prefix is used in the proper (SI) way.
So this bandwidth really is exactly 64,000 bits/sec
(8,000 samples/sec, each sample having 8 bits).
The M in a 2Mb/s connection is neither an SI prefix,
noris it identical to Mi. It's just sloppy language.
A 2 Mb/s connection is just a bundling of 32 such 64 kb/s channels,
resulting in a bandwidth of 32*64,000 = 2,048,000 bits/sec.

Cheers,

Ruud