Just a silly Friday post

It occurred to me today that no one really knows where the expression "OK" comes from. Oh, there are plenty of ideas about where it comes from but I don't like any of the explanations. And anyway, I've figured it out. But first a little background.

The character "K" is used a lot in computing and it stands for Kilo but it doesn't mean exactly the same thing as it does in the metric system. There, it is supposed to be used in lower case form, "k", and means 1,000. In computing, it is almost always written in upper case as "K" and means 1,024 because computer arithmetic is done in binary and 1,024 is 2 raised to the 10th power. So, if you wanted to tell someone how much memory a certain piece of computer code took up, you might say, "This function only takes up 2K," and that would mean that the function is relatively small and only uses up 2,048 bytes of memory.

So, imagine that you're trying to tell someone that everything is alright and there is nothing to worry about. Well, the more memory you might have, the more things you would have to worry about, right? So, if you had NO worries, then you would have NO memory to worry about and that would be zero bytes or 0K. Now I can see where people who don't know much about computers would get confused and think that zero is an upper case letter 'O' but they'd be wrong wouldn't they? But since there are a lot more people around that don't know much about computers, using the upper case 'O' won out and that's how we write it today. And, of course, you hear stories about how the expression "OK" was used a long time ago. Well, a long time ago, they didn't have computers and, you've probably guessed this, they didn't have any computer memory either - they had "0K" and everything was "OK".

Anyway, that's where "OK" comes from - you have no worries, you have no memory to think about, everything is "0K". Yeah, that's got to be right.