MARS and The Cell Broadband Architecture

I tend to place the blame more on those who originally coined the term "kilobyte" to refer to
1024 bytes.

Using SI prefixes for powers of two is a blatant abuse of the SI system, but the difference
probably seemed minor at the time.  As you noted, it's not until you start getting into the
higher orders that the error becomes significant.

For people in metric countries that use metric measurements every day -- kilometres,
kilograms, etc. -- it's a whole lot easier to be annoyed by the misuse of "kilo" than by the
coining of "kibi" to clear things up.

(And to the original poster... are you seriously saying that every time you see "KiB", you
have to look it up on Wikipedia?  Especially when it's apparently your pet peeve?)