How Many Kilobytes are in a Megabyte and How is it Calculated?

[myth8u5t3r]

simple questions:

How many kilobtyes are in a megabyte, and how do you explain this?

and

If i have, let's say, 178,000 kilobytes how many megabytes would this translate to? and how can it be explained?

 

[mgb_phys]

It's a tricky question.
Technically kilo means 1000 and mega means 1,000,000
But in computers it's often easier to talk about multiples of 1024 so in general speak a kilobyte is 1024 bytes. Techncially this should be called a kibobyte (kibo=1024).

Then you get into marketing speak, hard drives that are sold as 100Mega bytes will often be 100,000,000 bytes - the computer working in kibobytes will list this as only 95Mb ie. 100,000,000 / (1024*1204)

So 178,000kb could be 178Mb or 173.8Mb depending