kilo was borrowed from the base 10 system to represent 1024 in the base 2 system because where was not a prefix for it. Since that convention was established, there have arisen several alternate conventions and terms. However, these have not been accepted into the mainstream vocabulary. One convention is instead of kilo, mega, giga, and tera; to use kibi, mebi, gibi, and tebi as the prefixes for the binary system (meaning the powers of 2 - i.e. 1 kibibyte = 1024 bytes and 1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes). Another convention is to use a lower case letter for the prefix in the abbreviation to indicate that a power of 10 was used (i.e. 1 KB = 1024 bytes while 1 kB = 1000 bytes). It is also common for communication methods to state specification on a per bit basis instead of bytes and to use the base 10 use of the prefixes. Often times bits are abbreviated with a lower case 'b' and bytes with a capital 'B' (i.e. 1 Kbps is 1000 bits per second and 1 KB/s is 1024 bytes per second).
