1's & 0's: Cool sounding Mega-prefixes

So what if you type a few paragraphs and it is over a thousand characters or bytes? Well, since the computer stores bytes as 2 to the ? Power when we reach 2^10 (1024) it is called a Kilobyte. Why Kilo? Well, in the metric system Kilo means 1,000 if I remember correctly.
Now, we come down to the age-old computer question of WHY is a Kilobyte (K) 1024 bytes and not 1000 bytes? Well, according to the metric 'purists' I'll call them 1000 is truly a Kilobyte. In a perfect world of base-10 I suppose it is a great metrics name, Kilobyte, Kilo meaning a thousand. But wait, we're not in a perfect base-10 world, we're in a computer realm of base-2, remember?

So, as we represented succeeding numbers with each 1 being a power of 2 or 2^10 we found it equals 1024, NOT 1,000. Therefore, computers see a Kilobyte or K as 1024 not 1000. Does that make sense? Say yes! :-)

Here's the “cool sounding” prefixes that will dazzle your friends at the water cooler. A thousand (1024 really) is a K or Kilobyte. What if you have 1024K or 1024 Kilobytes? Well, then you could say it is 1024K or you could go to the next level and say it is a Megabyte or MB for short. Here's a list of all of these.

1024 bytes or 1024^1 = 1K (Kilobyte)
1024K or 1024^2 bytes = 1Mb (Megabyte)
1024Mb or 1024^3 bytes = 1Gb (Gigabyte)
1024Gb or 1024^4 bytes = 1Tb (Terabyte)

Note that there are hard drives that have 1 terabyte of storage today. Also note that when you get into hard drives they use 1000 not 1024 but that is a discussion for another day. Perhaps my chart above should be in 1000 not 1024 as Kilo theoretically means 1000 (base 10) not 1024 (base 2). The important thing is to remember that the prefixes in order are:

Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta, Yotta.

Why the standard goes from zetta back to “Y” in yottabyte I have no idea. About ten years ago I heard that Boeing corporation had an Exabyte network for storing streaming video in the Seattle area. A more recent article predicts that by 2013 all of the hard drives combined shipping to all the customers in the world will equal a yottabyte a year. Interesting.