Megabyte

In the computer and information technology fields, other definitions have been used that arose for historical reasons of convenience.

A common usage has been to designate one megabyte as 1048576bytes (220 B), a quantity that conveniently expresses the binary architecture of digital computer memory.

The interpretation of using base 1024 originated as technical jargon for the byte multiples that needed to be expressed by the powers of 2 but lacked a convenient name.

As 1024 (210) approximates 1000 (103), roughly corresponding to the SI prefix kilo-, it was a convenient term to denote the binary multiple.

Depending on compression methods and file format, a megabyte of data can roughly be: The novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, hosted on Project Gutenberg as an uncompressed plain text file, is 0.429 MB.