Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (25673)	2/1/2005 2:44:47 PM
From: microhoogle!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Well here are more urban legends a la B Gates comment with some grain of truth in some of them: "Computers, in the future, may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." -- Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949. "I think there is a world market for, maybe, five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943. "I have traveled the length and breadth of this country, and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." -- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957. Despite the fact that IBM and its predecessor companies had been producing automatic data preocessing machines since 1896 (1886 if you go back to the first prototype) "But what .. is it good for?" -- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip. "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp.,1977. Certainly not of the size and cost of a 1977 DEC computer. "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is, inherently, of no value." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876. "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for Investment in the radio in the 1920s "The concept is interesting and well-formed. But, in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." -- A Yale Univ. management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.) "Who wants to hear actors talk?" -- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927 The year the Warner Brothers released the talkie - "The Jazz Singer", perhaps he was suggesting that the audiences would prefer to hear Al Jolson singing? "We don't like their sound and guitar music is on the way out." -- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962 " Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value." -- Marecha Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre. "Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction." -- Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872 "The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon." -- Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, 1873.

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (25673)	2/1/2005 2:51:52 PM
From: regli	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

I looked at some quotes in the Google returns and interestingly enough nobody stands up as a witness. It is simply a quote attributed to him. 1981 was the birth of the IBM PC and it originally had 16 KB expandable to 256 KB. Obviously Bill Gates had and did support more memory in the operating system that he supplied to IBM. An operating system for which he gets too much credit btw. "In 1981, Microsoft paid Seattle Software Works for an unauthorized clone of CP/M, and Microsoft licensed this clone to IBM which marketed it as PC-DOS on the first IBM PC in 1981, and Microsoft marketed it to all other PC OEMs as MS-DOS." maxframe.com Note that the competition (Digital Research CPM/86) already supported more memory and it was released in 1980. Given this environment in 1981 when EVERBODY wanted more memory (the 64 KB limitation was even causing problems for large documents in word processors that only supported in memory documents), the quote seems utterly ridiculous to me.

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (25673)	2/1/2005 3:56:14 PM
From: GraceZ	Respond to of 110194

According to Wikapedia, Mr. Gates claims this was wrongly attributed to him: en.wikiquote.org Wrongly Attributed Wikipedia has an article about: "No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer." and "640kb ought to be enough for anybody." Notes: Two variants of the same quote. Attributed to him in 1981 when designing DOS's conventional memory limit as ten times the amount in his computer; Gates has denied this quote and mentions that it is always provided without a source. tafkac.org wired.com QUESTION: I read in a newspaper that in 1981 you said, ``640K of memory should be enough for anybody.'' What did you mean when you said this? ANSWER: 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. The need for memory increases as computers get more potent and software gets more powerful. In fact, every couple of years the amount of memory address space needed to run whatever software is mainstream at the time just about doubles. This is well-known. When IBM introduced its PC in 1981, many people attacked Microsoft for its role. These critics said that 8-bit computers, which had 64K of address space, would last forever. They said we were wastefully throwing out great 8-bit programming by moving the world toward 16-bit computers. We at Microsoft disagreed. We knew that even 16-bit computers, which had 640K of available address space, would be adequate for only four or five years. (The IBM PC had 1 megabyte of logical address space. But 384K of this was assigned to special purposes, leaving 640K of memory available. That's where the now-infamous ``640K barrier'' came from.) A few years later, Microsoft was a big fan of Intel's 386 microprocessor chip, which gave computers a 32-bit address space. Modern operating systems can now take advantage of that seemingly vast potential memory. But even 32 bits of address space won't prove adequate as time goes on. Meanwhile, 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.