Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 3/1/25 4:13 AM, Stéphane CARPENTIER wrote:

Le 28-02-2025, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> a écrit :

>
Consider those hard drives. The makers sold them with capacities measured
in MB and GB (and approaching TB, at that point). But the OSes reported
file sizes and available space in units they also called “kB”, “MB” and
“GB”, but were actually kiB, MiB and GiB.

 In fact, it's the other way around. OSes reported units in power of two
because that's what existed at the time. When the makers wanted to cheat
the consumers and reported the units in power of ten. Putting their own
definitions on the units printed in very little characters.
 And then some guys came saying the sellers are right, the OSes need to
change the units used from the beginning to adapt to the sellers.

   Well, esp since Gates, "commercial" DID become a
   major factor. With that goal, confusing the buyers
   became a sure thing.
   When American were used to 350 cubic inch engines
   in their cars, using 'CCs' generated bigger numbers
   and those tended to impress even though a lot of
   those engines were of much smaller displacement.
   Fooled enough of the people enough of the time.
   Oh, 'my' (the bosses) first hard drive was a
   10-MEGAbyte Rodime full-height. Wow ! SO
   impressive !  :-)
   I think it cost like $3000 1985 dollars too.
   The boss spent all weekend trying to get the PC
   to boot from it, reported failure. I came in on
   Monday, let it just sit for about 60 seconds,
   and it booted fine. The boss, while a bigger nerd
   than me, had NO patience alas - when it didn't
   boot in 10 seconds he'd reboot, and reboot,
   and reboot ... for two days .....  :-)