Timeline of Binary Prefixes - 1940s

1940s

• Prefixes kilo and mega are already widely used in the electronics industry for 1000 and 1000 000.

1943–1944

• J.W. Tukey coins the word bit as an abbreviation of "binary digit".

1947

• "The Whirlwind I Computer is being planned for a storage capacity of 2,048 numbers of 16 binary digits each."

1948

• Reference to Tukey's "bit" is made in a paper by information theorist Claude Shannon.