# Cheated by the CPU companies??

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [June 6, 2001, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851 "2001-06-06T22:59:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\
**Post date:** [June 8, 2001, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheated-by-the-cpu-companies/67851/21 "2001-06-08T15:49:38Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Cumber \*  
> \*\*
> 
> > [@](#):
> >
> > \*Originally posted by Mangetout \*  
> > \*\*Bear in mind that the term Kilobyte was coined at a time when it was thought of as a _large_ amount and Gigabyte was a term that we would never need because it was the stuff of SF.
> > 
> > So in the early days, the discrepancy was 24 bytes; big deal, they thought. \*\*
> 
> In the days when a kilobyte was a large amount of data, 24 bytes probably _would_ have been a big deal. Or not negligable anyway. In fact I would think probably would have to do with small numbers of bytes being important… since computers use base 2 it’s always going to be a pain to express computer-significant numbers precisely in decimal. How do you get around that problem? Base your terminology around computer-significant stuff rather than the number of fingers you’ve got. Close enough for people who aren’t in the buisiness anyway. \*\*

Sure, the _ **bytes** _ would have been important, but the fact that the terminology was inaccurate by 2 percent or so wouldn’t have been a worry, but with a gigabyte, the discrepancy rises to nearly 5 percent and so on.

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