• 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    71
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    An imperial unit (let’s remember we got this from the Brits who now say they’re metric… but are they?) is generally based on something in day-to-day life so they’re relevant. They would have probably been named in the late 40’s or early 50’s. So I suspect the they’d be based on ways data was transmitted then.

    • 4 taps (like on a telegraph) = 1 character
      • so 1 tap is 2 bits
    • 1 sheet (like paper) = 13,000 characters
      • so 1 sheet = 52,000 taps = 104,000 bits
    • … etc
    • 1 bankbox = 500 sheets = 26 million taps = 52 million bits

    edit: fixed my maths

  • fubo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    40
    ·
    1 year ago

    Today we have 64-bit computers (e.g. amd64), which descended from 32-bit computers (i386), which descended from 16-bit computers (Intel 8086), which descended from 8-bit computers (Intel 8008). Bit widths in our world naturally follow powers of two.

    However, some 1960s computers used word sizes that weren’t powers of two. Both IBM and DEC, among others, made 18- and 36-bit systems. Suppose that computing had continued to follow a multiples-of-nine pattern instead of the powers-of-two pattern?


    For one thing, hexadecimal is less common. If you’re writing 9-, 18-, 36-bit values, you typically write in octal, not hex. (In our world, Unix permissions modes are written in octal; Unix originated on the PDP-7, an 18-bit system.)

    IPv4 addresses are 36 bits wide instead of 32, and you write them in octal instead of decimal. localhost is 700.0.0.1, and a typical LAN subnet mask is 777.777.777.0.

    No hexadecimal means no 0xDEADBEEF or 0xCAFEBABE jokes. However, memory or files that get overwritten with junk are said to be “525’d”, because binary 101010101... is octal 525252....


    char would be nine bits wide instead of eight. This affects the development of character sets.

    In our world, ASCII was originally a 6-bit encoding, expanded to 7-bits to support lowercase. IBM then extended it to 8-bits with code pages for different European languages, creating 8-bit PC extended ASCII. However, no single code page supports all European languages, to say nothing of non-European ones. This led to the invention of multibyte character encodings and ultimately Unicode.

    In 9-bit world, multibyte characters are adopted earlier, using the high bit to indicate an extended character. Code pages don’t get invented; mojibake never happens.


    With 36-bit time_t, the Year 2038 problem doesn’t happen; the time_t’s don’t wrap around until the year 3058!


    A 3½" high-density floppy disk stores one megabyte of 9-bit bytes.

  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    33
    ·
    1 year ago

    Marketing already does this. You always see sizes measured in songs, or battery life measured in movies.

  • Izzy@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    1 year ago

    Lengths such as inches, feet and miles they are all unrelated to one another so here is my proposal.

    Instead of the kilobyte range we would have a bet. This is the size of the extended ascii table off 255 ascii characters that are 7 bits each or 1785 bytes. The bet comes from alphabet.

    Instead of megabytes we have the img which is based off the average size of a photo at 1.44mb which is only coincidentally the same size of a floppy disk.

    Instead of a gigabyte we have the bloat which is derived from total install size of Windows XP at around 2.4gb.

    • raubarno@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Windows 11 installation requirements in Crown English:

      • 27 bloats of free space in the hard disk drive;
      • 1⅔ bloats of RAM;
      • Processor with at least of 60 milliard beats per minute clock rate;
    • vis4valentine@lemmy.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      In addition to that we may add a Jude because a the average MP3 file of Hey Jude by the Beatles is around 8 MB.

  • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    You know digital storage isn’t metric, right? It’s powers of two, not powers of ten. Since more of US Customary is based on powers of two than metric is, I’m confident in saying they’re already in Freedom Units.

      • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@midwest.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Not really? They say kilo, mega, giga, tera, but they’re not actually 1000s of each other… they’re 1024 of each other.

        • Phlimy@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          9
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          No, the powers of 1024 are called “Kibibyte (KiB)”, " Mebibyte (MiB) and “Gibibyte (GiB)” (those are called “binary prefixes”). Gigabyte is 1000^3. This is why hard drive manufacturers use Gb instead of Gib, because it lets them sell a smaller drive with the same number before the prefix (2 TB < 2 TiB).
          Prior to 1998, it was ambiguous, and some usages of the metric prefixes to denote 1024^n persist to this day (hello Windows). But nowadays any usage of 1024^n should absolutely use the binary prefixes.

          • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@midwest.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            1 year ago

            The difference between “should” and “do”. Windows is a huge market share, you can’t act like they’re some weird exception.

            • Phlimy@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              1 year ago

              I mean sure, it’s true there’s still ambiguous usage. But that doesn’t change the fact that hard drive manufacturer use the powers of 1000, which is what the previous comment was about.

        • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          As SI prefixes, they’re all multiples of ten, technically speaking. So referring to 1,024 bytes as a kilobyte is incorrect, it’s 1.024 kilobytes or 1 kibibyte. Microsoft deciding to ignore industry and international standards is the reason for the confusion.

          But either way, hard drive manufacturers will sell a 1TB drive, and Windows will see that as a 935GB drive - that’s basically the difference between 2^40 bytes vs. 10^12 bytes

  • Sequentialsilence@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    We currently are, but not really. A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, and a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, etc. However macOS and hardware manufacturers use 1000 instead of 1024 to calculate storage space. So you could say Apple uses the metric version of storage and Windows uses the imperial version.

    • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      1 KiB is addressed by exactly 10 bits. 1 MiB is addressed by exactly 20 bits. 1 GiB is addressed by exactly 30 bits. 1 TiB is addressed by exactly 40 bits.

      1KB is addressed by 9.9657842846621 bits. 1MB is addressed by 19.931568569324 bits. 1GB is addressed by 29.897352853986 bits. 1TB is addressed by 39.863137138648 bits.

      I know which one looks cleaner to me…

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Bitrates complicate this, because they predate modern computing. It’s information theory. Radio signal transmission genuinely can measure in partial bits. And all bandwidth is described in plain metric prefixes.

        So you can have an 8000 kbps video, lasting one second, and it weighs 976 KB.

    • JulyTheMonth@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Technically a gigabyte is 1000 megabyte. Megabytes are 1000 kilobytes and kilobytes are 1000 bytes. Which are all proper metric units but sadly don’t make any sense. So datasystem manufactures and computer generally calculate with their proper counterparts that you mentions gibibyte mebibyte and kibibyte which sre actualy 1024 of their previous ones. Small but crucial difference.

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 year ago

      You could say Windows and Linux use the real size, while Apple and Manifacturers lie to you lol

      Nothing metric about that

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      If metric is against binary, I don’t want to be metric.

      I mean, it is a decimal system, but I feel like the spirit is there.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Don’t forget that some company made a custom CD back in the day and called it a shoehorn, and there’s about 769.223 shoehorns to your acre.

  • derekabutton@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Storage could be measured in what is needed for various files. They would have to be of various sizes, but not linearly increasing much like inch, foot, yard.

    Launch Codes, Pledge of Allegiances, Constitutions, God Bless the U.S.As, Average individual’s Patriot Act file (Pafs for short), etc.

  • Throwaway
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Bytes? Its already freedom units, you just didn’t realize it.