Re: Most infamous "Last words":

"You'll never need more than 64K of memory" -- Allegedly, Bill Gates circa 1985 in an interview.

I say allegedly because after searching Google I couldn't actually find the quote cited. I didn't try all that hard admittedly, but according to folklore "The Bill" said that and later ammended that to say "You'll never need more than 640K".

Here I sit with a laptop with 1Gb of memory and quite frequently when I've started Apache, Tomcat, Postgres and a couple of my development tools I notice my disk spinning like crazy, check vmstat and sure enough I'm in swap hell.

The more things change... the more they stay the same.

UPDATE:

It vexed me terribly that I couldn't find the quote. So I checked a few more places and discovered what I'd suspected for a while. Apparently the quote is a misattributed quote. On wikiquote I find a page about Bill Gates and under the section called appropriately enough "Misattributions" I find the following quote: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."

Still... I remember the day when we thought upgrading from 8K of RAM to 16K of RAM was something really really super.

There it is... you learn something every day...

Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg

Comment on Re: Most infamous "Last words":

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Re^2: Most infamous "Last words": by Anonymous Monk on Oct 20, 2013 at 13:38 UTC
I remember reading that in pc magazine, compute or some such 81-83 area he just flipped off to an interviewer who was harassing him on dos'es memory limits. I doubt he meant it and sounded annoyed by the response he gave. I doubt you will ever find a direct source, one the archives back then were nonexistent and 2 heck he could buy the reference to make it go away. Also I remember it as "no one will ever need more then 640k" when at the time 386-512 was the norm and 640 was a huge increase.	[reply]

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Re^2: Most infamous "Last words":
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 20, 2013 at 13:38 UTC

I remember reading that in pc magazine, compute or some such 81-83 area he just flipped off to an interviewer who was harassing him on dos'es memory limits. I doubt he meant it and sounded annoyed by the response he gave. I doubt you will ever find a direct source, one the archives back then were nonexistent and 2 heck he could buy the reference to make it go away. Also I remember it as "no one will ever need more then 640k" when at the time 386-512 was the norm and 640 was a huge increase.

[reply]