Units reported by ifconfig

[Cesare Tirabassi]

On Thursday 17 July 2008 10:34:21 Scott James Remnant wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 22:02 +0200, Jan Claeys wrote:
> > Op maandag 14-07-2008 om 10:53 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Scott James
> >
> > Remnant:
> > > Since ifconfig deals with bytes streamed, you can arguably claim it
> > > should be multiples of 1,024 or multiples of 1,000.  Someone just needs
> > > to decide.
> >
> > Traditionally, bandwidth has always been measured in multiples of 10,
> > not multiples of 2.
>
> Citation Needed.
>
> Scott

In the good old days they still used bauds to measure bandwidth (which at the 
time, with 2 states per symbol was equal to bps). Bauds are SI units, and I 
do remember that the typical mistake was to take 1 kBd as 1024 Bd instead of 
the correct 1000 Bd.
That must have been after the civil war but perhaps before the great one.

Cesare

PS. If you want a paper citation, I quickly scanned John L. Hennessy and David 
A. Patterson excellent "Computer Architecture: a quantitatice approach", 3rd 
Edition and they do indeed use multiples of 10.