If there are 1000 meters in a kilometer, then why are there 1024 bytes in a kilobyte?

Answer 1

1024 is a "binary 1000", that is it's a convenient measure of memory size, since memory is accessed by a binary number specifying the address. Memory construction also reflects binary thinking. Specific bits of the address are connected to their own enabling lines that connect to similar portions of multiple blocks of memory. A megabyte is 1024^2, or 1,048,576 bytes.
Interestingly, makers of hard disks often state their capacity in "megabytes" that actually are 1,000,000 bytes. This allows them a 5% inflation factor. I imagine they also use gigabytes of a billion rather than 1,073,741,824 bytes.

Answer 2

Some people are trying to standardize this, because it makes no sense that a kilometer would be 1000 meters, but a kilobyte would be anything other than 1000 bytes. According to SI, kilo- means 1000, and that's that. There is a proposal to introduce the prefix kibi-, which would mean 1024.

Answer 3

Technically, there are 1000 bytes in a kilobyte. But most memory comes in doubling increments; 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. They just round it off to make it simpler.

Answer 4

Because computers run on something called binary code, which basically checks is a circuit is ON or OFF and then does stuff based on that.

For every circuit that you add you can have twice as many possible positions of on and off circuits. For example, with 1 circuit you only have 2 possible positions, on or off. With 2 circuits you have 4 possible positions, on/off, on/on, off/on, off/off.

A byte measures the number of positions your circuits can have. So bytes can only increase in powers of 2, since each circuit you add doubles the number of positions you have. There are 1024 bytes in a kilobyte because 1024=2^10 and 1024 is fairly close to 1000.

There are also 1024 kilobytes in a mega byte and 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte.

Answer 5

Because bytes double as they go up...
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 32768, 65536, 131072, 262144, 524288, 1048576...
So using all fingers and toes, you can count up over a million, (in binary).
1-512 on the toes, 1024-524288 on the fingers. do the math...
CyberNara

Answer 6

as everybody said, kilo means thousand, and there are 1000 metres in a kilometre. Now the question arises, why not 1000 bytes in a kilobyte? The reason is unknown to me, but it is usually counted as 1000...

Answer 7

because computers double the numbers all the time
so:
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024
and there you are :)
And i think its called a kilo because its the closest number to 1000 out of the numbers when doubled

Answer 8

Metric measurement is based on 10. Bits, bytes, etc. are based on powers of 2.