Timeline of Binary Prefixes - 2000s

2000s

2001

• IBM, z/Architecture, Reference Summary
  • Page 59, list the power of 2 and 16, and their decimal value. There is a column name 'Symbol', which list K(kilo), M(mega), G(giga), T(tera), P(peta) and E(exa) for the power of 2 of, respectively, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60

• Peuhkuri adopts IEC prefixes in his paper at the 2001 Internet Measurement Conference: "... allows maximum size of 224 that requires 1 GiB of RAM ... or acknowledgement numer is within 32 KiB range. ... on a PC with Celeron processor with 512 MiB of memory ... "

• The Linux kernel uses IEC prefixes.

2004

• 2004 revision of IEEE Standard Letter Symbols for Units of Measurement (SI Units, Customary Inch-Pound Units, and Certain Other Units), IEEE Std 260.1, incorporates IEC definitions for KiB, MiB etc, reserving the symbols kB, MB etc for their decimal counterparts.

2005

March

• IEC prefixes are adopted by the IEEE after a two-year trial period.
  • On March 19, 2005 the IEEE standard IEEE 1541-2002 (Prefixes for Binary Multiples) was elevated to a full-use standard by the IEEE Standards Association after a two-year trial period.

2007

• Windows Vista still uses the binary conventions (e.g., 1 KB = 1024 bytes, 1 MB = 1048576 bytes) for file and drive sizes, and for data rates
• GParted uses IEC prefixes for partition sizes
• Advanced Packaging Tool and Synaptic Package Manager use standard SI prefixes for file sizes
• BitTornado uses IEC prefixes for file sizes and standard SI prefixes for data rates
• IBM uses "exabyte" to mean 10246 bytes. "Each address space, called a 64-bit address space, is 16 exabytes (EB) in size; an exabyte is slightly more than one billion gigabytes. The new address space has logically 264 addresses. It is 8 billion times the size of the former 2-gigabyte address space, or 18,446,744,073,709,600,000 bytes."

2008

• The US National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines require use of IEC prefixes KiB, MiB ... (and not kB, MB) for binary byte multiples
  • p29, “The names and symbols for the prefixes corresponding to 2 10, 2 20, 2 30, 2 40, 2 50, and 2 60 are, respectively: kibi, Ki; mebi, Mi; gibi, Gi; tebi, Ti; pebi, Pi; and exbi, Ei. Thus, for example, one kibibyte is also written as 1 KiB = 2 10 B = 1024 B, where B denotes the unit byte. Although these prefixes are not part of the SI, they should be used in the field of information technology to avoid the non-standard usage of the SI prefixes.”

2009

• Apple Inc. uses the SI decimal definitions for capacity (e.g., 1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes) in the Mac OS X v10.6 operating system to conform with standards body recommendations and avoid conflict with hard drive manufacturers' specifications.