Final edit:

This ambiguity is documented at least back to 1984, by IBM, the pre-eminent computer company of the time.

In 1972 IBM started selling the IBM 3333 magnetic disk drive. This product catalog [0] from 1979 shows them marketing the corresponding disks as "100 million bytes" or "200 million bytes" (3336 mdl 1 and 3336 mdl 11, respectively). By 1984, those same disks were marketed in the "IBM Input/Output Device Summary"[1] (which was intended for a customer audience) as "100MB" and "200MB"

0: (PDF page 281) "IBM 3330 DISK STORAGE" http://electronicsandbooks.com/edt/manual/Hardware/I/IBM%20w...

1: (PDF page 38, labeled page 2-7, Fig 2-4) http://electronicsandbooks.com/edt/manual/Hardware/I/IBM%20w...

Also, hats off to http://electronicsandbooks.com/ for keeping such incredible records available for the internet to browse.

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Edit: The below is wrong. Older experience has corrected me - there has always been ambiguity (perhaps bifurcated between CPU/OS and storage domains). "And that with such great confidence!", indeed.

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The article presents wishful thinking. The wish is for "kilobyte" to have one meaning. For the majority of its existence, it had only one meaning - 1024 bytes. Now it has an ambiguous meaning. People wish for an unambiguous term for 1000 bits, however that word does not exist. People also might wish that others use kibibyte any time they reference 1024 bytes, but that is also wishful thinking.

The author's wishful thinking is falsely presented as fact.

I think kilobyte was the wrong word to ever use for 1024 bytes, and I'd love to go back in time to tell computer scientists that they needed to invent a new prefix to mean "1,024" / "2^10" of something, which kilo- never meant before kilobit / kilobyte were invented. Kibi- is fine, the phonetics sound slightly silly to native English speakers, but the 'bi' indicates binary and I think that's reasonable.

I'm just not going to fool myself with wishful thinking. If, in arrogance or self-righteousness, one simply assumes that every time they see "kilobyte" it means 1,000 bytes - then they will make many, many failures. We will always have to take care to verify whether "kilobyte" means 1,000 or 1,024 bytes before implementing something which relies on that for correctness.

1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?