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What was the decision making process that lead to the IEC to create "kibibytes", "mebibytes" and so forth?

To me it seems like kilobytes were well established as 1024 bytes, both by programmers using them and by electronic engineers. Indeed, even now the 1024 byte kilobyte is commonly used when talking about memories of various kinds.

JEDEC had also standardized on the 1024 byte kilobyte, and it remains in widespread use by billions of JEDEC standards compliant devices.

So I'm interested in the arguments used and the decision making process that lead the IEC to decide that kilobytes would be redefined as 1000 bytes, and the creation of the rather awkward "kibibytes".

To me it seems like kilobytes were well established as 1024 bytes, both by programmers using them and by electronic engineers

They are not the only people though. The term got confusing mostly because of disk manufacturers who preferred base 10 because you disk capacity was a larger number. Perhaps the most egregious nonsense comes from the high density floppy disk which is described as having 1.44 Megabytes where a Megabyte is defined as 1000 kilobytes and a kilobyte is defined as 1024 bytes. i.e. 1.44 x 1000 x 1024 which is plainly ridiculous.

Also "kilo", "tera" and "mega" are standard SI terms meaning various powers of 1,000 (in base 10). It should, therefore, be a good idea to have different names for the base 2 versions.

Disclaimer: I personally ignore the base 2 names and abbreviations because they are stupid.

While JDEC memory standards were using 1024 Byte Kilobytes at the time, many magnetic storage devices were using 1000 Byte Kilobyte size for several reasons.

To explain where the 1024 Byte value comes from, it is a nice convenient 2^10 value.

However, this use of power of twos only applied to RAM and ROM. Magnetic media did not use power of two dimensions, and thus when marketing saw that they had to chose between two numbers, the irrelevant 1024 based standard of memory or 1000 based traditional metric standard. They chose the traditional metric standard, since neither produced a nice round number and the 1000 based number created a large number.

This of course caused untold issues, and neither side was really wrong. Disk drives were not JDEC memory devices. IEC, thus decided to settle the matter on disk drives by having two different units for magnetic data storage. Kibibytes and KiloBytes.

These prefixes are part of the International System of Units - though, they have already been used before, since introduced with the metric system in 1795.

When Computers (and memory) became a thing, engineers used these prefixes in a similar Manner. After all,

So I'm interested in the arguments used and the decision making process that lead the IEC to decide that kilobytes would be redefined as 1000 bytes,

There was no redefinition, as 'kilobytes' isn't a unit of its own. It's 'kilo' as prefix with the fixed definition of 1000 and 'byte' as, well, a byte. So Kilobyte always meant 1000 bytes.

These prefixes are part of the International System of Units (SI) - though, they have already been used before, since introduced with the metric system in 1795. Within SI there are no different units for the same thing (like inch, feet, yard, furlongs, chains and miles for length) but always only own (meter for length, Ampere for current and so on). To use them in different circumstances they are prefixed according to powers of 10. A very convenient system.

And it were sloppy engineers that used this convenience to describe certain binary values with somewhat close values - as 2^10 is 1024 and thus close to 1000. These were never official units in any way, just a kludge to get along. Standard documents always used power of 10 pefixes - which leads btw to the effect of serial transmissions always being decimal - a 9.6 kbit line transfers 9600 bit per second, not 9830 :)

When computers came out of the closet in the 80s, people stated to recognize that these kilobytes aren't really a kilo bytes but different, so it was common to capitalize the K, as the SI prefix uses a lower case k. Nice idea - as long as memories stayed in the range of a few dozend to a few hundred KB, but when 1024 KB where reached, it broke, as the SI prefix M is already uppercase.

In the late 1980s/early 1990s it became obvious that there is a need for a clear meaning, so an international standard was proposed - and accepted in the late 1990s.

Soit'S now more than 20 years later ... heck, not even the Englishdid complain that long about the loss of their non decimal currency.

and the creation of the rather awkward "kibibytes".

The binary prefixes are anything but awkward. They offer an easy, convenient and well defined way to operate with (almost) the same prefixes than for any other unit, but now making it binary, which does make a lot of sense for computing, doesn't it?

Just make it always uppercase and add a lowercase 'i' and it's binary. No more confusion.