KB, MB, GB, and TB are all part of the metric system. What empirical measurements should we Free™️ Americans use for computer memory?

Size of an uncompressed image of the Washington Crossing the Delaware painting = 1 Yankee

12 Yankees in a Doodle

60 Doodles in an Ounce (entirely unrelated to the volume or weight usage of ounce)

60 Doodles in a Dandy
- That's too straightforward. It should be 113 Doodles in a Dandy. And 73 Dandies in a Macaroni.
- giggity
Make sure to make the specific term "Computer Ounce", or co. oz.
- Better yet, just use "cooz" as the "common unit"
  
  Then it's proportioned following fluid ounce measurements from there. e.g. "coc" (computer cup) is 16 coozes.
- Ayyy, I'm in COLORADO so this would be great.
- I second this. It makes total sense - computer memory is a volume to be filled with data. They ain't call parts of a hard drive volumes for nothing.
Sampled at what resolution, though? It's a physical painting and the true, atomic-scale resolution would make this whole system useless.

May I suggest the entire constitution in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) instead? Bonus points if any future amendments change the whole system.

Edit: I suppose you actually want to start small. Maybe just the declaration sans-signatures, then. So, 6610*7 = 46,270 bits.
Congrats, in my almost year on Lemmy, this is the best comment I've seen!

How about feet of IBM punch cards?

A 1 foot tall stack holds 1,647,360 bits of data if all 80 columns are used. If only 72 columns are used for data then it's 1,482,624 bits of data and the remaining columns can be used to number each card so they can be put back in order after the stack is dropped.

I like this because the amount of bits in a stack can vary depending on whose foot you use to measure, or the thickness of the card stock.
- IBM standard cards are one 48th of a barleycorn thick. I believe IBM measured from the 1932 Iowa Reference Barleycorn, now kept in the vault inside Mt Rushmore.
THIS is what I’m talking about!

1 tweet = 140 bytes

1 (printed) page = 60 lines of 60 characters = 3600 bytes

1 moa (minute of audio in 128000 bps mp3) = 960000 bytes

1 mov (minute of video) = typically around 30MB but varies by resolution and encoding, like ounces vs troy ounces vs apothecary ounces.

1 loc (library of congress, used for measuring hard drive capacity) = around 10TB depending on jurisdiction.

These are all rough averages, of course, but Tweets can be rather bigger than 140 bytes since they're Unicode, not ASCII. What's Twitter without emoji?
1 moa (minute of audio in 128000 bps mp3)

Give me 320000 bps or give me death!

bit, Nibble, Byte, Word, doubleword, longword, quadword, double-quadword, verylongword, halfword

They check all Imperial criteria:

confusing names
some used only in some systems
size depends on where you are
some may overlap
doesn't manage to cover all the possible needs, but do you really need more than 64 bits?
would probably cause you to crash a rocket

Words! Of course! Imperial measurement is words. Because they are as inconsistent as other imperial units.

Did anyone say Magabyte yet?

1/6th of a MAGAbyte is an insurrection
Ugh. I hate you.

Upvoted.

I would suggest:

1KB = storage capacity of 1 kg of 1.44 floppy disks.
1MB = storage capacity of 0.0106 mile of CD drives.
1GB = storage capacity of 1 good computer in the 2000s.
1TB = storage capacity of 1 truck of GB (see above)

PS: just to be clear, I meant CD drives, not CD discs.

1 kg

(͡•_ ͡• )

Don't you mean one pound, abbreviated lb?
- Naw, it's actually one Kinda Gallon; a Kinda Gallon of course referring to the average of the masses of a gallon of water, a gallon of beer, and a gallon of whiskey.
I know you're joking, but that first Kb definition makes me grind my teeth!

1.44 floppy disks can store, well, 1.44 MEGAbytes. So how can 1 kg of floppy disks can just store 1 KB?
- Thank you for your compliment. I love it. The floppy disk is 1.44 non-freedom MB, not 0.015264 miles of CD drives.

KiB, MiB, GiB etc are more clear. It makes a big difference especially 1TB vs 1TiB.

The American way would probably be still using the units you listed but still meaning 1024, just to be confusing.

Either that or maybe something that uses physical measurement of a hard-drive (or CD?) using length. Like that new game is 24.0854 inches of data (maybe it could be 1.467 miles of CD?).

The difference really needs to be enforced.

My ram is in GiB but advertised in GB ???
- Your RAM is in GiB and GB. You can measure it either way you prefer. If you prefer big numbers, you can say you have 137,438,953,472 bits of RAM
MigaBytes?
- MiB = mebibyte

Most people would use "word", "half-word", "quarter-word" etc, but the Anglophiles insist on "tuppit", "ternary piece", "span" and "chunk" (that's 5 bits, or 12 old bits).

A milebyte is 5280 bytes

my harddrive is 250 toby keiths and my processer is 500 lee greenwoods

@cupcakezealot @BmeBenji why not 100 trumps processor rate.
- i dunno that much seems almost criminal
- Because trump’s processor doesn’t have an IPC. It uses CPI instead and w’d have to start using scientific notation

Mp3s, standard def movies, HD movies, and 4k movies.

I’ve seen so many products advertised by how many “songs” or “movies” it can hold. Never mind you can encode the same movie to be massive or small. So I think we’ve found the right answer!

why go for RAMs when the constitution says ARMs...

and no more bits or bytes too, double bytes small or quadbytes regular size all the way.

kilo bytes is a grand
mega bytes is a venti
giga bytes is a grand venti
terabytes is a doble venti

really large amounts of ARM is a ton

why go for RAMs when the constitution says ARMs...

x86 is heresy

From smallest to biggest:

Bits (basic unit)

Bytes (8:1 reduction)

Words (4:1 reduction)

KiB (32:1 reduction)

MiB (1024:1)

GiB (1024:1)

TiB (1024:1)

PiB (1024:1)

A normal amount of porn (237:1)

All definitely not metric as metric uses steps of 1000 (and there's also 10 and 100 and 1/10th and 1/100th but that doesn't extend to 10000 and 1/10000th).

The KiB, MiB, etc, the 2^10 scale is called binary prefixes (as opposed to decimal prefixes KB, MB, etc) and standardised by the IEC.

And while the B in KiB is always going to mean eight bits it's not a given that a byte is actually eight bits, network people still use "octet" to disambiguate because back in the days there were plenty of architectures around with other byte sizes. "byte" simply means "smallest number of bits an operation like addition will be done in" in the context of architectures. Then you have word for two bytes, d(ouble)word for four, q(uad)word for eight, o(cto)word for 16, and presumably h(ex)word for 32 it's already hard to find owords in the wild. Yes it's off by one of course it's off by one what do you expect it's about computers. There's also nibble for half a byte.

EDIT: Actually that's incorrect word is also architecture-dependent, the word/dword/qword sequence applies to architectures (like x86) which went from being 16-bit machines to now being 64 bit while keeping backwards compatibility. E.g. RISC-V uses 32-bit words, 16 bits there are a half-word.

The bit, at least, is not under contention everyone agrees what it is. Though you can occasionally see people staring in wild disbelief and confusion at statements such as "this information can be stored in ~1.58 bits". That number is ~ log₂ 3, that is, the information that fits in one trit. Such as "true, false, maybe".
- Great write up, glad to see mention of nibble (my favorite lol)… You forgot to mention byte order (Little/Big Endian).
- So you're saying my proposed imperial units depend on where you are, and who is using them, for what purpose? That just sells me on them as imperial units even more. :)
  
  Thank you for the details.
Words aren't always four bytes
Words (4:1 reduction)

Word is imperial unit. Like one british gallon is not equal to one us gallon, one x86 word is not equal one ARM word.

12 bits to an eagle

27 eagles to a liberty (changes whenever an amendment is added)

1776 liberties to a freedom

Computers are still programmed in bytes, but filesize is always in freedoms.

Perhaps bandwidth could be calculated around the fire rate of an AR15?

I know you asked about memory, but the computer I just assembled had a 750watt power supply. As an American I think we should refer to it as a "one horsepower power supply" instead.

That’s not bad, but is there a digital equivalent of a horse we could use?
- Nyan cats
One hor... Bwahahaha!

(GIF)

We should measure size of files/storage as a function of how many standardized png's of an american flag would fit in the same amount of space.

We should measure size of files/storage as a function of how many ~~standardized~~ png’s of an american flag would fit in the same amount of space.

Fixed it, I will not be oppressed by your standards
- Surely it would be a standardized png determined by each state legislation so... of varying sizes.
digital freedom units

1 sperm is 37.5MB.

If it's for American context then you mean 1 baby
- Every sperm is sacred.

char, short, int, long, long long

unsigned long long and minus unsigned long long
- I didn't do C++ for over 5 years. Does minus unsigned really give you one bit of data extra?

M$ already fucked that up for everybody calling GiB GB.

Cut to a younger me looking at HDDs in Walmart, and wondering why the fuck they were using much higher numbers than what the drive actually had. That's when I learned the difference, and started grow my hate for advertising bullshit.

May I suggest OB for Ounce Byte, or 28.35 Byte, one 16th of a PB PoundByte which is 453,6 Bytes.
These measures are both practical as freedom units because it's base is close to 28, which is clearly more suitable than 32 as a freedom unit base number, and the Pound Byte can be easily halved 4 times to make an Ounce Byte. Which makes it about as convenient as other freedom units.

Finally someone is making sense. I was getting depressed with all the logical metric inspired units disguised as jokes everywhere in this thread. You get it. Thank you 🙏

Probably something based on 1/6 th of a byte that originates form old IBM systems that used 6 bits per byte that was then later never changed into 8 bit systems so you now have to convert between 6 bit and 8 bit systems and then fractions, gotta get those good fractions. So they'd say something like my SSD is 170⅔ GB for a 128GB drive

I use jiffies to refer to clock speed.

BogoMIPS

My CPU is running at 2.6 Triple thou cycles per imperial second (TTiS)

Don't you mean Triple Imperial Thousand Seconds?

Bushels of data

What can you fit in a bushel?
- That's 1 day of Facebook, or 5 minutes of Netflix, or roughly 11.2milibits driven over 2 Chicago style city blocks.

1 bible = 69 porn clips = 420 feet (unrelated to the other measurement)

Football fields, Olympic size swimming pools, hotdogs, and quarters

All, of course based on how many kerned 1s and 0s (alternatingly) you could fit printed in 12pt Times New Roman font within the thing's length.

Also, you need to alternate rounding your error (i.e. quarter rounds down, but hotdog rounds up, etc)
You forgot washing machines.

Imperial, obviously: F(reedom)T(ons) and fractions thereof. 1FT is the amount of data that it takes to store the entire King James edition of the New Testament and the Bill of Rights as a PDF.

1 floppy = 1.44 MO
1 CD = 700 MO
1 DVD = 4,7 GO
1 HD DVD = 15 GO
1 Blu-Ray = 25 GO

Calling bytes 'O' is rather unamerican.
- ASCII byte is 7 bits. 8 bits is an octet.
This is the logical answer (so maybe not American?), as it would relate to how we handle data.

Also add 1 HDD = 1 TO
I second floppies being our new base unit

In America, you need a monthly subscription to use that system

Those are units of discrete quantity, so couple, dozen, score, gross, grand, etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-numerical_words_for_quantities

Fractional bits come up in non-deterministic situation, sometimes.
- Just use fractions, like with inches. ⅞

A bit in Freedom units is 2 metric bits because it wouldn't be freedom units without unnecessary confusion. A metric bit is equivalent to a freedom unit lil'bit, because it's smaller than a bit. A bite (no relation to a byte) is 25 lil'bits because saying 25 ones and zeros outload is a mouthful. A hot dog is 4.2 bites or 105 lil'bits because that's how many bites it takes me to eat a hot dog. A hamburger is 6.4 bites because it takes more bites to eat. A double with cheese is 7.8 bites. A whole hog is 233 hot dogs. A stampede is 23146 hamburgers.

Station wagon full of tapes

Why did I think that quote was from Clifford Stoll? (Sp?)

The Indians use Crore and Lakh

They use those for everything

A nugget: 1 bit
A tendy: 1 byte
A hot dog : 1 kb
A hamburger: 1 mb
A KFC bucket: 1 gb

The conversion to metric is way to easy
- Hahahahahaha! That's true.

1TB can be Recommended Chrome Ram?

I'm surprised there aren't more suggestions which use intentionally-similar abbreviations. The American customary system is rich with abbreviations which are deceptively similar, and I think the American computer memory units should match; confusion is the name of the game. Some examples from existing units:

millimeter (mm) vs thou (mil)
meter (m) vs mile (mi)
kilo (k) vs grand (G)
kilonewtons (kN) vs knots (kn)
statute mile (m/sm) vs survey mile (mi) vs nautical mile (NM/nmi) vs nanometer (nm)
foot (ft) vs fathom (ftm)
chain (ch) vs Switzerland (ch)
teaspoon (tsp) vs tablespoon (tbsp)
ounce (oz) vs fluid ounce (fl oz) vs troy ounce (ozt) vs Australia (Ozzie)
pint (pt) vs point (pt)
grain (gr) vs gram (g)
Kelvin (K) vs Rankine (R; aka "Kelvin for Americans")
short ton (t) vs long ton (???) vs metric tonne (t) vs refrigeration ton (TR)

We already have a confusing abbreviation: B vs b. One is bits, one is bytes.

It's a pretty drastic difference. One Gb per second is only 125 MB per second. Don't mess up your capitalization!
- It's for this reason I sometimes spell out the Bytes or bits. Eg: 88 Gbits/s or 1.44 MBytes
  
  It's also especially useful for endianness and bit ordering: MSByte vs MSbit
The knot is non-SI but perfectly metric and actually makes sense as a nautical mile is exactly one degree meridian. kn also doesn't clash with kN, Newtons are always written with capital N. Capitalisation generally matters. No standard abbreviation exists for nautical miles but definitely don't use nm because ~~newton~~nano metres.

That is, if you take all those colonial units out of there suddenly you're left with SI units and things that work well with SI units.

Oh and a pint is 500ml, a pound is 500g, a hundredweight is 50kg (because 100 pound), and a teaspoon is rather approximate because everyone outside of North America will use an actual spoon you stir tea with. The important part is not the precise amount but distinguishing it from "a pinch" etc. I guess by extension ounces should be 25ml and 25g. While we're at it: An inch is 25mm, and a foot an even 1/3rd of a metre while a yard is exactly one metre.

Did you know that a Newton metre is about exactly one chocolate bar metre? The work it takes to lift it in about standard gravity, that is. Very intuitive.

t for ton is a quirk in SI, you can use Mg if you want. There's also other SI-adjacent strangeness such as the hectare, which is one hecto-are: While SI has meters for length and litres for volume somehow the are isn't official for area.
- No standard abbreviation exists for nautical miles but definitely don’t use nm because newton metres
  
  Since as you mentioned Newtons are N not n, Newton meters are Nm. nm means nanometer.
- The knot is non-SI but perfectly metric and actually makes sense as a nautical mile is exactly one degree meridian
  
  I do admire the nautical mile for being based on something which has proven to be continually relevant (maritime navigation) as well as being brought forward to new, related fields (aeronautical navigation). And I am aware that it was redefined in SI units, so there's no incompatibility. I'm mostly poking fun at the kN abbreviation; I agree that no one is confusing kilonewtons with knots, not unless there's a hurricane putting a torque on a broadcasting tower...
  
  No standard abbreviation exists for nautical miles
  
  We can invent one: kn-h. It's knot-hours, which is technically correct but horrific to look at. It's like the time I came across hp-h (horsepower-hour) to measure gasoline energy. :(
  
  if you take all those colonial unit
  
  In defense of the American national pride, I have to point out that many of these came from the Brits. Though we're guilty of perpetuating them, even after the British have given up on them haha
  
  An inch is 25mm, and a foot an even 1/3rd of a metre while a yard is exactly one metre.
  
  I'm a dual-capable American that can use either SI or US Customary -- it's the occupational hazard of being an engineer lol -- but I went into a cold sweat thinking about all the awful things that would happen with a 25 mm inch, and even worse things with 3 ft to the meter. Like, that's not even a multiple of 2, 5, or 10! At least let it be 40 inches to the meter. /s
  
  There's also other SI-adjacent strangeness such as the hectare
  
  I like to explain to other Americans that metric is easy, using the hectare as an example. What's a hectare? It's about 2.47 acre. Or more relatable, it's the average size of a Walmart supercenter, at about 107,000 sq ft.
  
  1 hectare == 1 Walmart

Power of Two

1GB is 29.8975 pots

1MB is 19.9315 pots

1 kB is 1024 bytes and a byte is 8 bits. That is not metric. It just uses metric prefixes.

1kB = 1000 bytes, 1KiB = 1024 bytes
- Don't forget the baker's kilobyte.
1kB is 1000B you are using KiB which Windows to this day calls KB -.-
- Linux kernel guilty as well. It reports memory in "kb", but digging through documentation, you will at some point see that they actually mean KiB. The "kb" would be 1000 bits.

TiB

One tebibyte equals 2^40 or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.

What makes that more intuitive than any of the others?
- I thought you wanted it to be more american

IEC

C13
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IEC_60320_plugs.jpg?

American football fields.

~~American~~ Football fields.

We can use bits instead of bytes. That way it can look 8x bigger than it really is and have no real bearing to modern computing.

An Uvalde is the memory equivalent of PCM 48 kHz sample rate of children screaming.

No, those are not metric, they just borrowed some prefixes, although it's not like metric designers invented those anyways.

Octal. Start expressing it in maga Octal with thoughts prayers and bullets for ones

I propose the base measurement is a Reagit - equal to 36 bit states, or half-bits (36 was the age of Ronald Reagan when the transistor was first invented in 1947)

The next smallest is the Nuclearyte equal to the quantity of times the United States has proven technological superiority in war by using an atomic bomb offensively. So 2 Reagits is 1 Nuclearyte.

After that is the number of US presidents to have survived an assassination attempt (8) known simply as the ‘Merit (and don’t forget the apostrophe). 8 nuclearytes is 1 ‘merit.

Next is the number of years after the birth of Our Lord when Americans landed on the moon. 1969 ‘merits is 1 L-unit (pronounced like Loon)

Even bigger still is the number of amendments it took for the damn commie government to realize that alcohol is essential for human survival. The 18th amendment was a mistake, but the 21st amendment was blessed by Our Father who Art in Heaven without a doubt. 3 L-units is 1 chug

Next is the number of young men who died fighting for the rights of our United States to remain unquestioned by the damn commie federal government during the great war for individually united liberties between 1860 and 1865. 490,309 chugs is 1 Right

And so far we haven’t needed any larger measurements.

You literally have no idea why measurement units exist do you?
- What community do you think we’re in? c/NewStandardProposals?

Letter to Grandma, The Bible, Vacation photo album, and Video Collection

These units are too logical and scientific for my free, spirited, emotional, irrational Christian brain so I need something that’s more intuitive.

Dec = 10 Cent = 100 Mil = 1000

Using historical, global linear language sounds good to me

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_prefix

Metric uses those for numbers less than 1, a situation that doesn't arrise in computing. There is nothing less than a bit, whether its set to 1 or 0.
- If you wanna be American, you gotta start thinking outside the box. A bit has two states, right? So a half-bit has only one state. Half-bits are truly American.

We should be using KB, MB, GB, and TB. Also we should adopt the entire International System of Units and stop with the shit we use. The army uses metric. Why can't the rest of the population?

This is a joke post. That’s why it’s in the programmer humor community
- Oh damn. Well then I rescind my statement. We should obviously use a Base-50 system. One bit for each state.

On the contrary.

KB = 1,000 bytes and MB = 1,000,000 is empirical.

KiB = 1024 bytes or 2¹⁰ and MiB = 1,048,576 or 2²⁰ is Metric.

Remember, empirical is the miserable system the rest of the world abandoned because it made math and science difficult. KB makes storage miserable, never being clear whether your have the exact space your box claims it does. Please continue to Free^TM yourself from British "nonsense", while the rest of the world evolves.

Empirical means based on data. The word you are looking for is imperial.

Also, metric measurements are in base 10, so you have it backwards.
- man's actually taking the piss at OP's use of "empirical" instead of "imperial"
  
  also, i doubt that measurements of data can be imperial or metric; even Bytes themselves are just measurements of 8 bits.
- It's all in good fun. No need to spoil the joke.
- Thank you for majoring in English. We need people like you to ruin the peace in this fragile world.
Where did you get this from? Yeah KiB means 1024 and KB is 1000 but that's not a difference between metric and imperial, judging from the Wikipedia article it seems it was just a matter of using 1024 for technical purposes and 1000 for marketing / simplicity. If anything the article says the metric systems(SI) rule of kilo meaning 1000 means KB is metric.

If anything this shows some of the weakness of metric and it's use of base 10. Yeah it works great in science and some math when we're usually talking in base 10, but that's not the only base you can use. In base 2 some of the imperial measurements are easier to deal with and convert between then metric for example

1 liter = 1111101000 ml 1 gallon = 10000000 fl oz

1 kg = 1111101000 g 1 pound = 10000 oz

The reverse of the above metric conversions, and all base 10 negative exponents, is a repeating number in binary which has to be truncated and leads to inaccurate calculations.

Systems of measure are arbitrary, there's no superior logical one because different systems of measure work better in different systems of math.

Try KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB, those are metric, KB is not

Other way round: prefixes that contain "bi" are binary, so 1024-based.
- Somebody needs to make a satire piece on how the "woke mob" is ruining computers because these units of measurement are all bi.
- Bipolar is 1024 based?
  
  Jokes aside, you're talking nonsense. 1024 based?

Yes another person who doesn't understand why the metric system sucks. American's (fuck yea) use only useful and descriptive units, so obviously MiB, KiB, GiB, etc. because who cares what the closest rounded Ten's digit is? The computer world deals in Bits.

I use Kb, Mb, Gb, in my world (networking). And MiB GiB and TiB when I want to know the actual size something is.

Why use metric? Because the fact that 1440KiB is 1.41MiB is annoying.

It doesn't make it better, it's just really much more convenient when you're working in a base 10 digit system. There are lots of times when the advantages of an alternative unit system outweighs that convenience.

Its a funny thing that so many people are emotionally attached to unit systems. It's a tool, use the best one for the job.
- The best tool for the job isn't ever metric ironically enough.
When I interned in a NOC I referred to bandwidth in GiB/s once or twice. The looks on the senior engineers' faces were priceless.