How many bytes are in a kilobyte? (Opinion)

How many bytes do you think are in a kilobyte? Google isn't much help.

1024, the original answer. As a bonus, it confuses those who believe metric to be a good system.

A kilobyte is 1000 bytes, but is often misused to mean 1024. The correct word to use when you mean 1024 is "kibibyte", abbreviated "KiB".

@dfranke the kilobyte, meaning 1024 bytes, was used long before the term kibibyte was invented. Just because humans have changed the meaning to suit themselves doesn't mean that the old term is incorrect.

@jonesmh quite the opposite: long before computers "kilo-" was universally agreed to mean 1000 of something, and anyone hearing "kilobyte" would naturally understand it to mean 1000 bytes. Then computers came along and, realizing that 1024 (being 2^10) is often a more convenient quantity to work with, people started abusing "kilobyte" to mean that because 1024 is close to 1000. Finally, since it was understood that this usage conflicts with the correct meaning, the "kibi-" prefix (along with with mibi, gibi, etc.) was invented so that we could have a word that unambiguously meant 1024 and wasn't an abuse of SI prefixes.

@dfranke Quite the opposite: the term kilobyte was used long before the term kibibyte (by at least 4 decades). I'm not saying that the term was confusing or that a new term was needed, but I'm saying that the term meant 1024 bytes before the new term was coined.

> term kilobyte was used long before the term kibibyte (by at least 4 decades)

Correct.

> the term meant 1024 bytes before the new term was coined.

Sort of. It *sometimes* meant 1024 and sometimes meant 1000, and the 1000 meaning is older. The ambiguity created the need for the new term.

30 years ago we said in Germany „Ka-Byte“ for the computer k (1024) instead of kilo and „M-Byte“ for the 1024^2 Byte instead of Mega. But now it‘s all kilo and mega.

By the way, harddrive vendors adjust it to their benefit. Your 200 GB harddrive has probably 190.000.000.000 Bytes. ;)

Then if a file is 174 KB on my computer, how much is it really in bytes?