Re: RAM manufacturers always used powers of two
Because each extra address line doubles the storage, thus inherently powers of 2. Tape, floppies and HDD have always used the approximate SI based amount based on powers of 10.
Sector sizes are naturally binary because of buffer memory. This, I guess, is why a "1.44MB" floppy holds 2880 sectors of 512 bytes; 1440KiB, which of course is neither 1.44MiB nor 1.44MB.
I think the same 1000KiB "MB" was also used for (some?) HDDs in the first half of the 90s.
What a mess.
(Dunno about tape.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
