Editing Binary prefix (section)

=== Early binary prefix proposals ===
Before the IEC standard, several alternative proposals existed for unique binary prefixes, starting in the late 1960s. In 1996, [[Markus Kuhn (computer scientist)|Markus Kuhn]] proposed the extra prefix "di" and the symbol [[suffix]] or [[subscript]] "2" to mean "binary"; so that, for example, "one dikilobyte" would mean "1024 bytes", denoted "K<sub>2</sub>B" or "K2B".<ref name="kuhn1996" />

In 1968, Donald Morrison proposed to use the Greek letter kappa ([[κ]]) to denote 1024, κ<sup>2</sup> to denote 1024<sup>2</sup>, and so on.<ref name="morr1968" /> (At the time, memory size was small, and only K was in widespread use.) In the same year, [[Wallace Givens]] responded with a suggestion to use bK as an abbreviation for 1024 and bK2 or bK<sup>2</sup> for 1024<sup>2</sup>, though he noted that neither the Greek letter nor lowercase letter b would be easy to reproduce on computer printers of the day.<ref name="give1968" /> [[Bruce Alan Martin]] of [[Brookhaven National Laboratory]] proposed that, instead of prefixes, binary powers of two were indicated by the letter [[binary scientific notation|B]] followed by the exponent, similar to [[E notation|E]] in [[decimal scientific notation]]. Thus one would write 3B20 for {{nowrap|3 × 2<sup>20</sup>}}.<ref name="mart1968" /> This convention is still used on some calculators to present binary floating point-numbers today.<ref name="schw1993" />

In 1969, [[Donald Knuth]], who uses decimal notation like 1&nbsp;MB = 1000&nbsp;kB,<ref name="knuth2016" /> proposed that the powers of 1024 be designated as "large kilobytes" and "large megabytes", with abbreviations KKB and MMB.<ref name="knuth1999" />