[psgamer0921]

Does anyone have a list of all the ***byte words that have been or will be used? (Start at giga, I know the others)

[onlyafterdark]

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html

[darshu]

Try this http://whatis.techtarget.com/definit...825099,00.html
Not the most official source, but what I could find on short notice.

Since I'm a pedant, I'll mention the whole kilo/kibi thing here. SI (metric) prefixes are supposed to be powers of 10. i.e. kilo == 10^3, mega == 10^6, etc. but with computers powers of two are far more useful. Since it was noticed that 1024 (2^10) and 1000 (10^3) are pretty close, it was thought convenient to use the prefix kilo to mean 1024 bytes. As we got up to gigabytes the numbers started to diverge quite a bit 2^30 == 1073741824 while 10^9 == 1000000000. Hard drive manufacturers suddenly realized that if they "corrected" this mistake they could make their hard drives sound much bigger than they actually were, so the HD companies decided to revert to powers of 10. Hence a 60GB HD has 60 billion bytes whereas the technically inclined might expect 64424509440 (60 * 2^30) bytes, so 4 billion bytes are "missing".

At some point someone, I believe it was NIST, decide to create new prefixes for the binary terms to remove this ambiguity. So 2^10 == 1 kibibyte , whereas 10^3 == 1 kilobyte. 2^20 == 1 mebibyte, etc. And the abbreviations are 1 kiB for a kibibyte, 1 MiB for a mebibyte etc. Unfortunately the names sound stupid so I, and most people I know continue to use 2^10 for kilo, etc.

[alcimedes]

yeah, someone has to realize that to successfully rename something, you can't give it a totally lame name. it just doesn't work. oh well.

[Mac+]

darshu nice info... you and alcimedes are both right - that naming convention is close to ridiculous, so it is understandable that not many people have taken it up!