Timeline of Binary Prefixes - 1990s

1990s

1990

• GEOS ad
  • "512K of memory"

June

• DEC RA90/RA92 Disk Drive Service Manual
  • "Storage capacity, formatted" "1.216 gigabytes"

1991

• The 19th CGPM defines the SI prefixes zetta, and yotta as 1021 and 1024.
• May 13: Apple releases Macintosh System 7 containing Finder 7.0 which uses M in a binary sense to describe HDD capacity.
  This is the first known instance of an operating system or utility using M in a binary sense.

• Micropolis 1528 Rigid Disk Drive Product Description
  • "1.53 GBytes" ... "Up to 1.53 gigabytes (unformatted) per drive" "MBytes/Unit: 1531.1" (2100×48,608×15 = 1,531,152,000)

1994

• Feb: Microsoft Windows for Workgroup 3.11 File Manager uses MB in a binary sense to describe HDD capacity. Prior versions of Windows only used K in a binary sense to describe HDD capacity.

• Micropolis 4410 Disk Drive Information
  • "1,052 MB Formatted Capacity"
  • "Unformatted Per Drive 1,205 MB" (133.85 MB per surface, 9 read-write heads)

1996

August

• FOLDOC defines the exabyte (1 EB) as 1024 petabytes (1024 PB), with petabyte used in the binary sense of 10245 B.

December

• Markus Kuhn proposes a system with di prefixes, like the "dikilobyte" (K₂B) and "digigabyte" (G₂B). Did not see significant adoption.

1997

May

• FOLDOC defines the zettabyte (1 ZB) as 1024 exabytes (1024 EB) and the yottabyte (1 YB) as 1024 zettabytes (1024 ZB).

1998

• IEC introduces unambiguous prefixes for binary multiples (KiB, MiB, GiB etc.), reserving kB, MB, GB and so on for their decimal sense.

1999

• Donald Knuth, who uses decimal notation like 1 MB = 1000 kB, expresses "astonishment" that the IEC proposal was adopted, calling them "funny-sounding", and proposes that the powers of 1024 be designated as "large kilobytes" and "large megabytes" (abbreviated KKB and MMB, as "doubling the letter connotes both binary-ness and large-ness"). Double prefixes were formerly used with SI, however, with a multiplicative meaning ("MMB" would be equivalent to "TB"), and this proposed usage never gained any traction.

• In November 1999, Steven W. Schlosser, John Linwood Griffin, David F. Nagle and Gregory R. Ganger adopt the symbol GiB for gibibyte in their paper Filling the Memory Access Gap: A Case for On-Chip Magnetic Storage: "... Although these numbers appear to yield a capacity of 2.98 GiB per sled, the capacity decreases ... This yields an effective capacity of about 2.098 GiB per sled. ... " and quote data throughput in mebibytes per second: "maximum throughput (MiB/s)"