take on the megabyte

I’m all for the ease, convenience and sensibility, so it’s no surprise that the Metric system is a far superior concept to the old British system we use.    I’m a 36 year old man and couldn’t tell you with how many ounces there were in a pound or what the boiling temperature of water in Fahrenheit is.   If you ask me how many feet are in a mile, I’d guess about 5342 and if you ask me how many fluid ounces there were in a gallon I’d look at you like you just asked me to identify each strain in the DNA strand.

So what I don’t get is the way that we measure electronic data.   Kilobytes to Megabytes to Gigabytes has a very metric (and logical) feel to it..BUT when you actually see the conversion you are told that there are 1024 KB in a megabyte and in turn 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte, so in other words there are 1,048,576 kilobytes in a gigabyte and 1,073,741,824 kilobytes in a terabyte which sound about as random as 5280 feet in a mile (I looked it up.. and i'm disputing this because my foot is a bit smaller than 12 inches).