Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable

experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC

makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

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If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford.

Now one of the things that confuses an old man like me is these prefixes that we attach to really big numbers,

particularly the storage size of hard drives, from

meggers to gigas to terrors and beyond.

So I invited Rob Eastaway into the studio.

Rob's a friend of more or less, the author of numerous books about maths, sport, and the maths

of sport.

He's also penned a handy guide to distinguishing your megabytes from your Woper watts.

So Rob, let's just start.

My first computer was, as it happens, an Oric, which was kind of a clone of the ZX spectrum,

and it had 48K of memory.

What does the K stand for?

So the K is Kilo.

This is from the Greek word Kilioi meaning a thousand and it first kind of got introduced to our language as

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