Ask the average person how many bytes are in a Gigabyte, and they'll undo your tie with the strength of their blank stare. Ask an engineer and there's a good chance even they'll have to at least think about it. Everyone knows how big an [American] billion is, and most people know how big a trillion is too. So here's my proposal for making the -byte system more intuitive by aligning the prefixes with the corresponding powers of 1000 in The Illion System:
| New Term | Equivalent | Old Term |
|---|---|---|
| 1 byte | 1 byte | 1 byte |
| 1 kilobyte | 1,000 bytes | 1 kilobyte |
| 1 millibyte | 1,000,000 bytes | 1 megabyte |
| 1 billibyte | 1,000,000,000 bytes | 1 gigabyte |
| 1 trillibyte | 1,000,000,000,000 bytes | 1 terabyte |
| 1 quadrillibyte | 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes | 1 petabyte |
| 1 quintillibyte | 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes | 1 exabyte |
... and so on.
Note on "The Illion System": Note on British and American billions:
ChatGPT has reliably informed me that the milli-billi-trilli-quadrilli- system is named "Illion System", making it sound like a Star Wars locale. I somehow doubt this is by any means standard, and since it has little bearing on the core point, I feel no need to research it.
Presumably due to the rise of the term and existence of "billionaires" and the lack of common use cases of 10^12 to reassert itself with, the British definition of "billion" has died a rapid death. While reviewing this article, a friend noted his displeasure with my implicit acquiescence to this Yank newspeak, and I sympathised with the displeasure, if not the practicality, so I felt it only polite to remind readers that a British billion is by rights a million million (10^12), and the American billion (10^9), would be called a milliard; however, 10^9 billion, and even 10^12 trillion are now concretely stuck in even the British vernacular. Evading this simple truth would defeat the object of the proposal
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