The Lance J. Technoweb

I started programming way back. In those olden days I was working close to the hardware - on machine language code (assembly languages). Bits were important: shift left, shift right, AND/OR/XOR. And memory pages were important too: fitting an important routine within a 256 byte page of RAM could really help performance. Today, life is different. Instead of choosing a memory address, Programmers allocate objects . If a programmer is storing a boolean, a boolean object is created. Who knows how that's represented under the hood, but it certainly isn't represented in one bit of RAM. Most programmers don't even use the bit-wise operators offered through the programming languages given to them. Sure, some do. But most do not. And so now we get into our prefixes: kilo, mega, giga, terra, and peta (and beyond, I suppose) Many programmers still want these prefixes to be based on powers of 2. One kilobyte is 1024 bytes (2^10). One megabyte is 1024*1024 bytes (2^20). Etc. It...