Indeed! Most people don't read ancient SF and I didn't expect that joke. Well played! > We have no indication who said it Kirk in ToS never said "Beam me up,

Indeed! Most people don't read ancient SF and I didn't expect that joke. Well played! > We have no indication who said it Kirk in ToS never said "Beam me up, Scotty", but that's the quote everyone knows. Truthiness trumps truth. It appears Gates' and Microsoft's views at the time were something like what he said in 1989: "That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time." Note that "a great deal of time" ruins what you think is a sarcastic joke. That qualifier is also exactly the sort of nuance that's worn off in retelling, as dropping it makes the retelling more interesting. Truthiness trumps truth. We know that the earliest form of that attributed quote is in an Infoworld article by editorial director James E. Fawcette, dated April 29, 1985 as "When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory. — William Gates, chairman of Microsoft" It has no citation, no additional context, and several other parts of the piece ("Legend has it" and "was reported") strongly suggest it was not written with historical accuracy foremost in mind. Instead, I interpret it as using these examples as parables to make the editorial argument more vivid. Truthiness trumps truth. Thing is, I agree it's a joke. I think the joke was "Look those derpy engineers. They're so close-minded! Don't they know that we always want more RAM, more disk space, and more of everything?!" But that raw joke questions engineering tradeoffs and decisions, and as you rightly point out, journalists rarely have that expertise. So the joke is made of Jobs and Gates, because it's always fun to take CEO's down a notch. Even if it wasn't true. Truthiness trumps truth.