Re: kb/s vs. kbit/s

Luchezar Georgiev wrote:
| Steve Fabian пишет:
|| Isn't the SI symbol for "kilobit/second" kb/s?
|
| I use "kbit/s" to avoid the ambiguity of "b": as "byte" or "bit".
| "Byte" is written with a capital "B" but to rely only on
| capitalisation isn't enough. I think that due to its ambiguity (do
| you know that a byte can be more than eight bits, for example
| twelve?!), the word "byte" must be removed and only "octet" used. So
| "ko" would always mean "kilooktet" and never "kilobit", as "KB" may
| mean if it's converted to small case. But "byte" is so widely used
| that this can't be done easily.

IBM invented the word "byte" for their S/360 series computers, to mean an
8-bit data element, in the early 1960s. For some reason IEEE made it a
standard with a confusing meaning: "less than a word"... I had worked with a
military computer made by Univac which had 1-b, 2-b or 3-b bytes, depending
on command option bits. Absolutely confusing! But not more confusing than to
take the two orthogonal dichotomies read-only vs. read-write storage and
random-access vs. non-random-access storage, and referring to all read-write
storage devices, whether or not they are actually random access, as RAM.
Most ROM in computers is truly RAM, but most RWM is not RAM - accessing
storage elements linearly is faster than randomly, though the storage
management usually does not take advantage of this.
--
Steve

.

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