Explanation of binary and decimal units and genesis of marketed size of 3,5″ floppy disk. Why is it really 1.38 MB? Additionaly some picture with hermetic joke for geeks, nerds and IT guys.
Did you know…
The size written on the 3,5″ floppy disk (1.44 MB) comes from wrong unit conversion. There are decimal (SI) and binary (computer) units. In decimal units 1000 bytes is one kilobyte. It’s usually used in marketing – and that’s why 500 GB hard disk is really about 465 GB. Binary units are real units in this case, used by computers, not only PR guys as previous. Each kilobyte has 1024 bytes. Floppy disk has 1440 kB in binary units. If you would divide it by 1024 you would get circa 1.41 MB (in binary units). In decimal units it would be circa 1.47 MB (1,474,560 divided by 1000, divided by 1000). Somebody counted kilobytes in binary units (i.e. 1440 kB) and divided it using decimal units – 1440 divided by 1000. It results 1.44 MB in some strange and mixed units. After formatting it (in FAT12 file system) it has about 1,38 MB in binary units.
