Knuth thought the international standard promulgated naming (kibibyte) was DOA.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news99.html

And he was right.

Context is important.

"K" is an excellent prefix for 1024 bytes when working with small computers, and a metric shit ton of time has been saved by standardizing on that.

When you get to bigger units, marketing intervenes, and, as other commenters have pointed out, we have the storage standard of MB == 1000 * 1024.

But why is that? Certainly it's because of the marketing, but also it's because KB has been standardized for bytes.

> Which is the reality. "kilobyte" means "1000 bytes". There's no possible discussion over this fact.

You couldn't be more wrong. Absolutely nobody talks about 8K bytes of memory and means 8000.