I never knew the whole thing was considered part of the metric system, makes sense though.
I love the metric system to death because its so simple and easy, and it links different measurements together ( 1l of water = 1kg etc ).
That said, a computer works differently and because we work in factors of 2, 1000 bytes being a kilobyte makes no sense once you start working with bits and low level stuff. Other than that, i can see why the stuff was redefined.
Also, i think linux also works in factors of 1024, but id need to check