The 1.44 MB diskette is my canonical "dear God what happened"-named thing.

The traditional diskette is 1440 KiB. I.e., base-2, today named "kibibyte" though in that day that word didn't exist yet & it was just a kilobyte and the base 2 inferred from context. Clearly, someone didn't infer, and moved the decimal, so that 1.44 "MB" is 1.44 * 1000 * 1024 bytes. The actual capacity is thus either 1.41 MiB or 1.47 MB.

Hard drives continued to make that mistake, and once you got to GB size they were overselling the disk space by an appreciable amount.

hard drives intentionally use giga and tera rather than gibi and tebi. They're right; it's the memory sticks that are usually wrong :-)

IMO it's the ISP's who are intentionally misleading people. Average Joe might have some inkling of how big a gigabyte is these days, but nobody except a network engineer cares what a gigabit is. I can't imagine how many people buy gigabit fiber expecting a gigabyte. It would sound much less impressive if it were marketed as 125MB/s like it should be. They should at least be required to show both, not make people convert units if they want to find out how fast their advertised internet is supposed to download their 50GB game.

I don't think that counts as intentionally misleading since bits/second is the correct measurement for any serial connection and has been since the days of Baudot. Joe Blow might misunderstand it but that's on Joe.

It's not like the situation with hard drives where they're going against industry convention for marketing purposes.

You could also blame Windows. Linux counts storage bytes in base 10. But still counts RAM in base 2.

Nobody says "gibibyte" out loud without giggling or getting giggled at. I think we should start saying "gigglebyte".

I've been calling them Kibbles, Marbles, Gerbils and Tribbles

Pebble scale computing is all the rage right now.

Know that several of your coworkers are laughing at you in their minds every time you utter such foolishness.

I have had to debug enough fires because of stupid unit confusion that I now make the point of being extremely pedantic with the use of the right unit.

jigglybits works too in the correct company

also cal state irvine had a compsci prof who said "jigga-byte"

One point twenty one jiggabytes??? Great Scott!

MacOS uses decimal units to display file sizes and it kinda drives me nuts.

> today named "kibibyte" though in that day that word didn't exist yet & it was just a kilobyte and the base 2 inferred from context

That is still what most people do. Only very pendantic individuals insist on using KiB, etc. Normal people are just fine inferring from context whether base-2 or base-10 is meant.

My opinion is use KiB as the abbreviation but pronounce it as kilobyte. It pisses off both sides but makes the most sense to me for both being technically and historically accurate at the same time.

I thought they tossed the fool that tried to make mebibyte a thing off a bridge and we tried to forget about that.

Perhaps the formatted capacity, or the safe capacity, but I can specifically recall being able to format those same floppies up to... I forget, maybe ~2MB? Something like that.

Yeah, the unformatted capacities of 3.5” floppy disks were:

SS-DD - 512KB

DS-DD - 1MB

HD - 2MB

ED - 4MB

LS (floptical) - 21MB

Technically you could format some of the lower density media in the high density drives and get the expanded capacity (although you may have needed to modify the media a little - holepunch to make an HD drive see a DS-DD disc as “HD”), although it wasn’t always very reliable and depended on the physical media and the capabilities of the individual drives.

Different file systems used the 2*80 tracks differently, hence the different formatted capacity, DOS usually had the lowest, Macintosh in the middle, Amiga had the most (although the Amiga HD floppies were a bit of a cludge - the drive spun at half speed due to a limitation of the Amiga floppy controller, which was also the reason you couldn’t just use a “PC” HD floppy in an Amiga without modification).

Yes, the typical formatted capacity. The word "traditional" was the brevity which was attempting to sum that up.

There were also other, weirder setups where you could get various other capacities. It was a wild time.

Same with older floppy disk formats. Using FAT16 (or FAT12 on some systems) you can often format DD 3.5" disks to 830K instead of the usual 720K. On the Amiga the same disks are usually 880K.

Back in the day -- when used for a disk drive -- we used to call 1000 * 1024 bytes a "marketing megabyte" and 1024*1024 bytes a "megabyte". YMMV.

My favorite example of this is using "aux cable" to refer to an audio cable with a 3 or 4 pin 3.5mm connector on the end (because car stereos would have a 3.5mm jack labeled "Aux" for "Auxiliary input")

I usually call those "headphone cables" just to be contrary.

You forgot SMPTE 170M, which is probably the definitive standard at this point:

https://pub.smpte.org/doc/st170/20041130-pub/st0170-2004_sta...

Not connector related, but I can't tell you how many people use time zones like PST year-round. The ST stands for "standard time," meaning not Daylight Saving Time. Right now, PDT would be appropriate.

The thing that kills me is that they could just say "PT" or "Pacific time" and be right, with less effort.

I always know what they mean, but it's wrong for more than half the year.