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Bill Gates: “I never said '640K should be enough for anybody'” (1996)
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago3MB of RAM should be enough for anybody to get a ticket out of the Sprawl.
- zmapuser 8y ago3MB of hot, hot ram
- bitwize 8y agoGibson's prose has a short shelf life. That's why he doesn't write future-set stories anymore. In the film of Johnny Mnemonic, the screenplay of which was penned by Gibson himself, Johnny must act as a courier for 320 GB by using a brain implant -- in 2025. It's 2018 in the real world, and data smugglers today would probably get farther by swallowing toy balloons with two or three microSD cards in them than by going the whole invasive wipe-your-childhood-memories brain implant route (if such a route were available).
- notheruser 8y agoNot true that Gibson's prose has a short shelf life. Neuromancer is in my view a timeless masterpiece, and Gibson's most recent book is set in the future.
- InternetOfStuff 8y agoWell, Neuromancer's first line doesn't make sense any more :-P That said, it's one of my favourite books.
- bitwize 8y agoIt didn't really make sense then either. No sky looks like television static. Jeff Minter's Polybius game pokes fun at it by showing the text "The sky was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel" -- before thrusting you into a level that literally had a static sky.
- InternetOfStuff 8y ago> It didn't really make sense then either. No sky looks like television static. If you'd like to be literal about it, dense snowfall, perhaps? Anyway, the point, I think, was that it shouldn't look like any sky today, but rather like a futuristic sky.
- mistersquid 8y agoI realize you say this somewhat in jest, but I want to respond to this because the first sentence of of William Gibson's _Neuromancer_ is paradoxically both timeless and time bound. > The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. That first sentence characterizes the novel's diegetic (in-narrative) setting by giving the sky a property of an alternate medium (television). Unlike gentler rhetorical assertions such as simile, the declaration that the sky possessed a property of television suggests that the setting--like the intra-diegetic setting of the (Morrocan) beach in which an unnamed adversarial AI imprisons Case--is also a media construct in which the reader is imprisoned. In other words, the media topology structuring the novel's outermost narrative is a recursive formation of one medium inside another medium and this structure is timeless. It's merely recursion. However, fully understanding the literary (as opposed to narrative) significance of such a structuration depends upon knowing what television was and why any of its channels might be "dead" as opposed to "live". A useful point of comparison can be found in William Shakespeare's _As You Like It_ (II.VII.139-143) All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. [. . .] The significance is timeless, drawing power from the assertion that life is in fact lived on a stage. On the other hand, the description is also time bound (as well as culturally circumscribed) depending as it does on the greatly diminished (since Elizabethan England) medium of live performance. EDIT: Fix predicate in first sentence. Formatting. Change "at" to "a" in penultimate sentence.
- taeric 8y agoI think the point is that my children will likely never know what a television tuned to a dead channel looks like. I've almost forgotten, myself. I say that as someone that finds that line rather nice.
- SuperPaintMan 8y agoYou reminded me of a post JWZ made a while back with a TV in his bar. It's neat how these things can be embedded into our collective experince. (Copy and paste the link, referrer shenanigans.) https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/
- KineticLensman 8y agoI think the technology descriptions have really dated. Exhibit A: Neuromancer. the Dornier-Fujitsu space yacht Haniwa, assembled in Orbit. "Case made out the familiar chatter of a printer turning out hard copy...Case snatched a length of twisted paper and glanced at it."
- adamc 8y agoWhen I read it at the time, I thought the techno-babble might as well have been called magic. It was OK, but masterpiece?
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoSurely there are a few masterpieces where explanations are given in magic-babble.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Razengan 8y agoIf you try to make your stories too future-proof you end up making it look like just magic. It may also become harder to relate to. See Numenera [0] though, set a billion years in the future, while still keeping a sense of familiarity. [0] https://numenera.com https://numenera.com
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dingaling 8y agoThe authors of the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual in the early 1990s sidestepped unforseeable computing progress by referring to 'kiloquads' of storage and never relating it to contemporary measurements. Since part of its purpose was as a writer's guide that terminlogy slipped into the shows and was quite believable when some character expressed surprise that a tiny chip could carry '15 kiloquads' of data. It worked very well.
- macintux 8y agoI'd argue it's poor writing that needed to refer to the amount of data, for anything. TNG really lost its way in technobabble.
- crooked-v 8y agoNumanera makes me go "meh", because it seems to mostly be an attempt to put a gloss of exoticity over tremendously unexciting game mechanics.
- Razengan 8y agoThe mechanics are supposed to get out of your way and Numenera’s Cypher system seems to do that job well. The setting too leaves a lot of room and options for a good DM to expand into and build upon. You can base almost any kind of story in Numenera, with tech levels ranging from primitive to medieval to hyper-sci-fi.
- jerf 8y agoStar Trek: The Next Generation referred to data sizes as "quads", which has the advantage that it has actually future-proofed the series a bit. It's fairly clear that whatever a "quad" is, it isn't just two bits smashed together, but what it is? Who knows.
- ken 8y agoIt's true that most of Star Trek uses vague or made-up terms for computing measures, but Data formally refers to his own storage in units of "quadrillion bits", and apparently using that as a definition of "quad" makes for a reasonable order-of-magnitude estimate for other uses, even today.
- interfixus 8y agoDoesn't matter. We all know there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
- maxwell 8y agoNo one actually wanted a computer in their home. They did want an interactive TV set.
- interfixus 8y agoOh, that explains why there's no market for more than five computers in the world.
- ddalex 8y agoThat's an accurate description for certain values of the term 'computer'
- chaotic_clanger 8y agothat's so last century... now we believe that 'nobody needs a quantum computer at home'
- hamilyon2 8y ago1024 qbits is surely enough for everything and everyone
- realharo 8y agoThis scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM#t=1h28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM#t=1h28s (at 1:00:28) shows why people would think that.
- overcast 8y agoIf smartphones are not considered a computer, then that probably is the case for the majority of people today.
- Shaddox 8y agoHah. Reading this is quite amusing. Tricksters and pranksters were just as prevalent on the internet back then as they are now.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago"Tricksters and pranksters" AKA good old fashioned trolling. It's a shame the modern definition of "troll" seems to have warped to include those who tell people to kill themselves on social media etc.
- maxwell 8y ago"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." But 64 bits should be enough for anybody.
- et2o 8y ago16 million terabytes will be a lot of RAM for at least a couple of decades.
- nabla9 8y agoFor local addressing inside a computer 16 exabytes is enough. For global or large system level addressing 128 to 256-bits should be enough. (note: you may want local 128-bit virtual addressing for other reasons than accessing more memory)
- cm2187 8y agoI think there are roughly 2^166 atoms on earth (translating 10^50 if I didn't mess up my maths). So clearly we don't need 256 bit addressing for any system!
- nabla9 8y agoThe problems of allocating memory addresses in global scale requires distributed probabilistic addressing or otherwise inefficient address space distributions. You don't want to share the same compact memory allocator with the malloc(3) from the other side of the galaxy, or even different city.
- pcunite 8y agoI have 16384000K of ram and I could use more. However, my use case might be different from someone browsing the web. :-)
- pure-awesome 8y agoI find it quite funny that there's a parallel discussion as to whether or not everything in a modern circuit board is implemented with NAND gates.
- wheelie_boy 8y agoYeah, I don't think it's a literal quote, unless it was in a very specific context. It was making fun of the 640K limitation of MS-DOS, and the implicit reasoning behind that hard limit.
- ckastner 8y agoA somewhat more extensive research of that quote: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/
- tabtab 8y agoPerhaps the most damning quote: "I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't..." -Bill Gates While he didn't use the exact words of the title quote, there are multiple sources which indicate he was indeed surprised at how fast applications grew in memory requirements/usage. Thus, I rate it as "partly true". At lot of it was probably caused by the switch from hand-crafted low-level code to libraries and compilers, which usually take up more RAM for comparable features. While such tools sometimes can produce compact code, it's often not considered economical by publishers.
- jl6 8y agoHaving watched a 4K movie, I can confidently say 640K should be enough for anybody.
- RoutinePlayer 8y agoLMAO
- LogicalBorg 8y agoWell, let's be scientific about this. If Bill Gates is willing to write me a check for 640K, I'll be happy to test his theory for him. ;-)
- LoSboccacc 8y agohttps://books.google.it/books?id=2C4EAAAAMBAJ&q=%22nobody+would%22&redir_esc=y&hl=en#v=snippet&q=%22nobody%20would%22&f=false https://books.google.it/books?id=2C4EAAAAMBAJ&q=%22nobody+wo... the fact that a direct quote doesn't exist doesn't mean that it wasn't the sentiment at the time.
- nolok 8y agoThe fact that it was the sentiment at the time is one thing, but it doesn't make attributing a quote to someone who didn't say it right or correct, even if it goes in the way of the general sentiment, even if that someone did agree with said sentiment.
- mgkimsal 8y agonor does it mean it was even bill gates' sentiment.
- princekolt 8y agoThis reply down the thread wins it for me: > I always thought he was talking about his monthly bonus, not computer memory... Ha!
- trumped 8y agosoon after that, it became his daily bonus...
- myself248 8y agoThis has always annoyed the piss out of me. It wouldn't have been Bill's or Microsoft's call to make, in the first place. The hardware memory map is not set by software. The 640K limitation derives from the 1MB address space of the IBM PC, and as the name implies, IBM did the hardware design. They did it around a particular Intel chip, which had a 1MB address space. IBM could've put in hardware support for bank switching (as some EMS/XMS add-in cards later did), they could've used a chip with more than 20 address lines, they could've done a lot of things. But they didn't. IBM wasn't designing a mainframe-killer, they were designing a personal computer. It was competing with 16k and 64k 8-bit machines, and the first IBM PCs shipped with 64k and later 128k of RAM. Using the top 384K for peripherals and allocating 640K for programs must've seemed insanely generous at the time. But whoever made that decision, it was on the hardware side, not anyone at Microsoft.
- oblio 8y ago> But whoever made that decision, it was on the hardware side, not anyone at Microsoft. The hardware supported more than 1MB, as later CPUs proved. However, MS-DOS didn't really support it, as EMS/XMS proved: https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/the-640-k-barrier/ https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/the-640-k-barrier/ I'd say that you've got it backwards, in my opinion. And in the opinion of that fine article I linked.
- antientropic 8y ago"The hardware" did not support more than 1 MB. The 8086/8088 had a 20-bit address space (reflected both in the segmentation model and the address bus), so that limits it to 1 MB.
- oblio 8y agoRead the article... Yes, obviously those CPUs didn't support it. But the later CPUs and PCs did, and yet the software (MS-DOS), didn't really support it. They had to use some gross hacks to access more memory. That excuse is valid for 8086, but it's no longer valid for the 386.
- nikanj 8y agoLinus Torvalds on the other hand did indeed say ”Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task - tough cookies” on the original Linux announcement email chain.
- taf2 8y agolike garrosh says, "times change" source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxY89F5oU-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxY89F5oU-I For both Linus and Bill - anything they said you have to remember the context. 640K was - "YUUGE" (always say it right) For Linus releasing linux at the time a 64Mb task was "YUUGE" (again just make sure you always say it right)
- vernie 8y agoGarrosh is referring to time travel.
- unmole 8y agoWell Linus also said his kernel won't be big and professional like GNU's.
- mcguire 8y agoWhich it isn't. :-)
- simias 8y agoThis is not really the same thing though, that's not saying "64MB per task should be enough for anybody", actually it's arguably the opposite. In his original announcement he clearly introduces his project has a somewhat limited OS.
- adrianmonk 8y agoThe way I'd read that, "tough cookies" doesn't mean it isn't a valid need. It just means it isn't supported.
- yuhong 8y agoOf course, this reminds me of the OS/2 2.0 fiasco.
- known 8y agoI think Gates overestimated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swappiness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swappiness
- cipherzero 8y agoOut of curiosity how did this chain end up on google groups? Where was the original and how was google able to ingest it? Thanks!
- myself248 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News
- cipherzero 8y agoThank you!
- sys_64738 8y agoSure, Bill. Of course you didn't say something like that as it would make you sound totally clueless to future generations. You wouldn't want a howler of a mistake like that to be your calling card, would you? So, yeah, of course you didn't say it.
- jaysonelliot 8y agoSlightly off-topic, but it's cool to see David Mikkelson posting in that Usenet group as "Snopes," as that's where he first used the name, even before launching the urban myth-busting site in the '90s.
- rconti 8y agoI had no idea Snopes was that old; that was my takeaway from this as well. We've always assumed it wasn't an actual quote from Gates, but I only knew Snopes as the website.
- dhimes 8y agoSnopes wasn't originally called "Snopes," was it? I seem to remember it as something else, like "urbanlengend" or something. Maybe the movie bought the name?
- jokoon 8y agoWhile today, 16GB of ram and 1TB of storage will soon not be enough for a modest computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law Although I'm sure hardware companies will find a way to promote deep learning techniques into home computers, which will obviously require more and more transistors.
- sys_64738 8y agoToday in 2018 you need 16GB. Back in 1998 it was 16MB and 20 years before that it was 16KB. That should tell you how much you'll need in 2038.
- diego_moita 8y agoWow... in a post denying that the comment never happened a lot of people here still take it as a fact. Now, what do you guy think about the "Al Gore said he invented the internet"? Ah, the wonders of a post-truth world...