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Comment on Why is 1 GB equal to 10^9 bytes instead of 2^30?parent

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I remember seeing a French Mac many years ago (pre-OS X). I don't know what kind of mega it used (there was no giga back then), but file sizes were reported as "Mo" rather than "MB", for "mega-octets", "octet" being the French word for byte. It sounded much classier to me.

Of course, aficionados of RFCs will know that "octet" is (or at least was) the preferred term for "byte" in IETF documents as well. I don't think this is because the RFC editor was secretly French, although i'm sure he was thoroughly classy; presumably it's because early RFCs were written in the era when the byte had not quite settled down at eight bits, and needed to be unambiguous.

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