> You didn't know it in e.g. 1990

False: source, I was there. Kilobyte and megabyte were powers of 1024, except in well-delineated circumstances (mass storage devices).

The size labeling of mass storage devices was widely reviled due to using a weasly definition of terms that everyone normally undestood to be powers of 1024.

> a lot of people won't get on board with it, so the confusion persists.

The idea that people refusing to change their behavior according to someone's wishes are causing confusion is fallacious.

Of course it's those introducing change that are introducing confusion.

The kibi-mebi people failed to predict human behavior; that they cannot just roll out a vocabulary change to all of humanity the way you roll out a new kernel throughout a machine cluster.

The irony is that you can even find people who were not born at the time, who are using kilobyte to mean 1024 bytes.

I was there too. What you call being "widely reviled" is just another way of saying "in common usage". Maybe you "reviled" it, but it was just convention. So it's not false, and it wasn't well delineated. Just like it continues not to be.

Why don't you take a look at Wikipedia which clearly describes the many, many, many places in which powers-of-10 is used, and then also has a section on powers-of-2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Units_based_on_powers_of_...

Remember, it wasn't just hard drives either. It's been data transfer speeds, network speeds, tape capacities, etc. There's an awful lot of stuff in computing that doesn't inherently depend on powers of 2 for its scaling.

And so as long as we have both units and will always have both units, it makes sense to give them different names. And, obviously, the one that matches the SI system should have the same name as it. Can you seriously disagree? Again, I don't care what you say in conversation. But in labels and specifications, how can you argue against it?