Timeline Of Binary Prefixes
1940s
1943-1944
J.W. Tukey coins the word bit as an abbreviation of "binary digit".
1948
Reference to Tukey's "bit" is made in a paper by information theorist Claude Shannon.
1950s
In the 1950s, "1 kilobit" meant "1000 bits":
"In the '50s, amazingly enough---and only total coincidence---I actually was given the job of writing the operational specifications They handed me this thing and said, "You're going to define how the hand-over process works between direction centers,"
