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Sophirayesterday at 6:00 PM2 repliesview on HN

> Early diskettes always used 1000

Even worse, the 3.5" HD floppy disk format used a confusing combination of the two. Its true capacity (when formatted as FAT12) is 1,474,560 bytes. Divide that by 1024 and you get 1440KB; divide that by 1000 and you get the oft-quoted (and often printed on the disk itself) "1.44MB", which is inaccurate no matter how you look at it.


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card_zeroyesterday at 6:28 PM

I'm not seeing evidence for a 1970s 1000-byte kilobyte. Wikipedia's floppy disk page mentions the IBM Diskette 1 at 242944 bytes (a multiple of 256), and then 5¼-inch disks at 368640 bytes and 1228800 bytes, both multiples of 1024. These are sector sizes. Nobody had a 1000-byte sector, I'll assert.

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publicdebatesyesterday at 6:44 PM

Human history is full of cases where silly mistakes became precedent. HTTP "referal" is just another example.

I wonder if there's a wikipedia article listing these...

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