An imperial unit (let’s remember we got this from the Brits who now say they’re metric… but are they?) is generally based on something in day-to-day life so they’re relevant. They would have probably been named in the late 40’s or early 50’s. So I suspect the they’d be based on ways data was transmitted then.
- 4 taps (like on a telegraph) = 1 character
- so 1 tap is 2 bits
- 1 sheet (like paper) = 13,000 characters
- so 1 sheet = 52,000 taps = 104,000 bits
- … etc
- 1 bankbox = 500 sheets = 26 million taps = 52 million bits
edit: fixed my maths
Aren’t morse characters are 1 to 3 taps long?
It’s 1 to 4 for the English alphabet, though only E is a 1 tap. I started with 3 taps = 1 character but then all the whole number in my examples go away.
Letters are 1-4, numbers are 5 taps
Ah, my mistake
- 4 taps (like on a telegraph) = 1 character
Marketing already does this. You always see sizes measured in songs, or battery life measured in movies.
Lengths such as inches, feet and miles they are all unrelated to one another so here is my proposal.
Instead of the kilobyte range we would have a
bet. This is the size of the extended ascii table off 255 ascii characters that are 7 bits each or 1785 bytes. Thebetcomes from alphabet.Instead of megabytes we have the
imgwhich is based off the average size of a photo at 1.44mb which is only coincidentally the same size of a floppy disk.Instead of a gigabyte we have the
bloatwhich is derived from total install size of Windows XP at around 2.4gb.Windows 11 installation requirements in Crown English:
- 27 bloats of free space in the hard disk drive;
- 1⅔ bloats of RAM;
- Processor with at least of 60 milliard beats per minute clock rate;
- …
In addition to that we may add a Jude because a the average MP3 file of Hey Jude by the Beatles is around 8 MB.
You know digital storage isn’t metric, right? It’s powers of two, not powers of ten. Since more of US Customary is based on powers of two than metric is, I’m confident in saying they’re already in Freedom Units.
Unless you’re a hard drive manufacturer, of course :)
Not really? They say kilo, mega, giga, tera, but they’re not actually 1000s of each other… they’re 1024 of each other.
this is exactly why the kibibyte, mebibyte, etc. were introduced.
As SI prefixes, they’re all multiples of ten, technically speaking. So referring to 1,024 bytes as a kilobyte is incorrect, it’s 1.024 kilobytes or 1 kibibyte. Microsoft deciding to ignore industry and international standards is the reason for the confusion.
But either way, hard drive manufacturers will sell a 1TB drive, and Windows will see that as a 935GB drive - that’s basically the difference between 2^40 bytes vs. 10^12 bytes
I thought how many “Library of Congress” would fit was the freedom unit of storage? https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/03/how-many-libraries-of-congress-does-it-take/
Freedom binary digits are 7 and 4 🇺🇸