Kilobyte

A kilobyte is a measure of computer memory or storage.

Its abbreviation is kB

It is a 1,000 bytes. The metric system assigns 'kilo' to mean 1000 so from this point of view it is exactly one thousand bytes. In 1998 the International System of Quantities declared that the kilobyte should only be used to mean 1000 bytes.

However confusion arises because computer engineers work with base 2 binary systems and they borrowed the word kilobyte to refer to

$$2^{10}$$

This is 1,024 decimal.

In order to address this multiple use of kilobyte, in 1998 the IEC standards organisation invented a new term for the binary version namely the kibibyte. However it has never really caught on and people still use the same word for 1000 bytes and 1024 bytes.

2020-10