> Early diskettes always used 1000
Even worse, the 3.5" HD floppy disk format used a confusing combination of the two. Its true capacity (when formatted as FAT12) is 1,474,560 bytes. Divide that by 1024 and you get 1440KB; divide that by 1000 and you get the oft-quoted (and often printed on the disk itself) "1.44MB", which is inaccurate no matter how you look at it.
I'm not seeing evidence for a 1970s 1000-byte kilobyte. Wikipedia's floppy disk page mentions the IBM Diskette 1 at 242944 bytes (a multiple of 256), and then 5¼-inch disks at 368640 bytes and 1228800 bytes, both multiples of 1024. These are sector sizes. Nobody had a 1000-byte sector, I'll assert.
The wiki page agrees with parent, "The double-sided, high-density 1.44 MB (actually 1440 KiB = 1.41 MiB or 1.47 MB) disk drive, which would become the most popular, first shipped in 1986"
To make things even more confusing, the high-density floppy introduced on the Amiga 3000 stored 1760 KiB
At least there it stored exactly 3,520 512-byte sectors, or 1,760 KB. They didn't describe them as 1.76MB floppies.
Human history is full of cases where silly mistakes became precedent. HTTP "referal" is just another example.
I wonder if there's a wikipedia article listing these...
It's "referer" in the HTTP standard, but "referrer" when correctly spelled in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer