The units were pretty unambiguous for a long time. For a long time disk storage was measured in 2^10x, at least in operating systems, then hard disk manufacturers decided the way they reported disk size would be 10^3x. Obviously the prefixes having a different meaning in a different context is not perfect, but that's nothing new, for people in SI countries kilo is used for kilogram, any other meaning is hardly related. Calories are counted in kcal without ever mentioning the kilo prefix. A lot of the confusion in IT is from adding additional binary xxbi units that feel contrived and aren't very well accepted.
Maybe among IT people they were but, IT isn't everything. If you had shown 1kX to a physicist, he would've automatically assumed that you were talking about 10^3 times X no matter what X was. I actually live (and grew up) in an SI country and the system works beautifully. Sure, people say kilo to refer to 1kg, but this practice gets a huge amount of criticism from teachers over here, who keep insisting that kilo=1000.
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The units were pretty unambiguous for a long time. For a long time disk storage was measured in 2^10x, at least in operating systems, then hard disk manufacturers decided the way they reported disk size would be 10^3x. Obviously the prefixes having a different meaning in a different context is not perfect, but that's nothing new, for people in SI countries kilo is used for kilogram, any other meaning is hardly related. Calories are counted in kcal without ever mentioning the kilo prefix. A lot of the confusion in IT is from adding additional binary xxbi units that feel contrived and aren't very well accepted.
Maybe among IT people they were but, IT isn't everything. If you had shown 1kX to a physicist, he would've automatically assumed that you were talking about 10^3 times X no matter what X was. I actually live (and grew up) in an SI country and the system works beautifully. Sure, people say kilo to refer to 1kg, but this practice gets a huge amount of criticism from teachers over here, who keep insisting that kilo=1000.