An imperial unit (let's remember we got this from the Brits who now say they're metric... but are they?) is generally based on something in day-to-day life so they're relevant. They would have probably been named in the late 40's or early 50's. So I suspect the they'd be based on ways data was transmitted then.
- 4 taps (like on a telegraph) = 1 character
- so 1 tap is 2 bits
- 1 sheet (like paper) = 13,000 characters
- so 1 sheet = 52,000 taps = 104,000 bits
- ... etc
- 1 bankbox = 500 sheets = 26 million taps = 52 million bits
edit: fixed my maths
- 4 taps (like on a telegraph) = 1 character
Lengths such as inches, feet and miles they are all unrelated to one another so here is my proposal.
Instead of the kilobyte range we would have a
bet. This is the size of the extended ascii table off 255 ascii characters that are 7 bits each or 1785 bytes. Thebetcomes from alphabet.Instead of megabytes we have the
imgwhich is based off the average size of a photo at 1.44mb which is only coincidentally the same size of a floppy disk.Instead of a gigabyte we have the
bloatwhich is derived from total install size of Windows XP at around 2.4gb.In addition to that we may add a Jude because a the average MP3 file of Hey Jude by the Beatles is around 8 MB.
Don't forget that some company made a custom CD back in the day and called it a shoehorn, and there's about 769.223 shoehorns to your acre.
There's like words and longs, could probably play with that a bit. Also, a kb is 1024 bytes because it's 2^10, could play with that too lol.
You know digital storage isn't metric, right? It's powers of two, not powers of ten. Since more of US Customary is based on powers of two than metric is, I'm confident in saying they're already in Freedom Units.
