Only to find when you measured the actual stats, you bought a 7.4 gigabyte hard drive and a 15 inch monitor. Companies started finding ways of artificially inflating their specifications. Unfortunately, these measures have become standard over the whole industry. What we really have is industry wide lying.
Lets start with monitors.
TV sets have always been measured by the diagonal screen size. In the early days of TV, the sets were far larger than the screens. So it was only fair to measure them by the actual screens. For whatever reason, the computer industry started measuring the plastic frame around the screen, this added a couple of inches to the actual screen size. If you want to know what kind of monitor you are buying, go by viewable area rather than the advertised statistic.