7 ms·

Urban legend: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers

131 points by bschne 2y ago

amelius 2y ago
"is", not "will only ever be"
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- TheCoelacanth 2y ago
  The worldwide part is also made up. He wasn't talking about the entire world market, just the companies they tried to sell to on one specific marketing campaign.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
Leading contender for actual quote: "... we expected to get orders for five [IBM 701] machines, we came home with orders for 18."
- hinkley 2y ago
  Out of the 20 potential customers they pitched to. So they were counting on a 25% success rate and got 90%.
  - thmsths 2y ago
    I wonder if it caused any issues. Getting 3 times the amount of orders can be great, but it can also be pyrrhic victory, depending on your ability to deliver.
    - t0mas88 2y ago
      With this order size there is no public pricing information. So if you can't deliver fast enough you would adjust prices or specifically charge more for the first few delivery slots. Compare it to ordering very high price items with long lead time like airliners, you pay for a specific delivery slot, not just the item at a random moment. And you can buy options to more deliveries in a specific timeframe, which influences the price of your order.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      At the time (if TFA is correct) the 701 had already existed for a year. So it was only a question of building more of them, not that they had sold 5 vs 18 of something that didn't exist yet. But, they were also most likely on the hook for installing and running them -- at that time a computer like that would have been leased with installation services and on-site operations staff included.
    - moralestapia 2y ago
      No, it did not cause any issues.
    - bityard 2y ago
      From a salescritter's perspective, that is frankly not their problem.
- graymatters 2y ago
  The premise of the article (if it can be called that) is incorrect. He made the statement about the 5 computers in a TV interview (and it was not related to business trip referred in the article). I saw the recording of the interview some 10-15 years ago. Don’t remember which network. Perhaps NBC?
  - anamexis 2y ago
    Well, the article is certainly better sourced than you thinking you saw a counter example 10-15 years ago on TV.
  - ivan_gammel 2y ago
    What you say doesn’t make sense at all. The article describes a shareholder meeting in 1953, when IBM was already aware that the market is much bigger. It had to happen significantly earlier, but not later than in 1940s, because the concept of programmable electronic machine (a computer, not calculator) was established only then. And they were selling a lot of calculators by then. At that time there was no such thing as TV broadcasting casually interviewing various people.
ecshafer 2y ago
I haven't thought about this much before, but I think it must be a myth. Going from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM wiki on the history of Wikipedia, there were "Computing machines" in the 30s referring to their calculators and tabulating machines. IBM was already selling more than 5 of these devices, so if the 1943 date was true, it makes no sense. So it referring to a single machine having a market of 5 devices, that might be true.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  Yeah, there were so many specialist analog computing machines out there in the 1940s and earlier that the pop culture interpretation of the quote as being "for all digital computers of all types the world over" just doesn't pass the sniff test.
- veqq 2y ago
  In the 60s, you'd have offices with thousands of such machines: https://aurorasginjoint.com/2017/08/19/a-look-at-billy-wilders-the-apartment-office-wise/ https://aurorasginjoint.com/2017/08/19/a-look-at-billy-wilde... (in the movie, he mentions 30k employees on all the floors). On this floor, I believe they're mechanical calculators with extra functions (unsure what).
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  There were already more than five electro-mechanical computers built by the end of WWII. And several electronic ones, shortly after that. So the paraphrase is indeed nonsense.
Analemma_ 2y ago
People really love apocryphal quotes that portray famous or disliked figures as morons. Bill Gates never said "640k ought to be enough for anybody" either, yet that circulates to this day.
- ciberado 2y ago
  On the other hand, sometimes se non è vero, è ben trovato. We need stories. Models. The Gandhi we know was not the real one, same for Churchill or any other person, and the same thing happens with some villains. My personal point of view is that apocryphal quotes are just an extension of that mechanism, and can be useful in the construction of our thoughts.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    Sure, but the formula is so clunky. Just take: A) a person famous for their brilliance or other quality B) a humdrum everyday failing experienced by regular people, such as hubris, poor ability to predict the future, problems in school, difficulty in relationships, etc. Mix them together and you get "Einstein flunked math in primary school" and Freud saying "who knows what women want" and other stuff. I'm all for stories, but these aren't very good ones.
    - lynguist 2y ago
      Nah the formula is different: 1. Take some conditional and true statement: “The original IBM PC can address 1024KB memory of which 640KB are in user space.” 2. Remove all conditionalities: “The PC has 640KB RAM as that’s all one needs.” 3. Attribute it to a famous figure: “Bill Gates said that 640K is all anyone ought to need.”
- bitwize 2y ago
  Today, 4 GiB, which was enough to run an entire university back in the 90s, is what the most rinky-dink Wal-Mart special laptops come with and Windows barely runs at all on that much. If Bill Gates had said "640k ought to be enough for everybody", at the time he could hardly be blamed for doing so, as single-user desktop machines of the day still typically shipped with 1/10 or 1/5 that much.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bitwize 2y ago
As I understand it... one of the reasons why the Soviets fell behind in computer technology was because back in the 60s, while Soviet engineers had good designs that were state-of-the-art for the era, the communist economic planners estimated the requirements for computer manufacture to be one per university or government department for a total of maybe a few thousand, while Western manufacturers were getting orders into the tens or hundreds of thousands... and they had to come up with new technologies to produce the machines faster and cheaper in order to keep up, let alone compete with other manufacturers. So the market in the west grew explosively, requiring concomitant growth in innovation, and that put the Soviets on the back foot, requiring them to smuggle in and reverse engineer System/370s, PDPs, etc. in order to stay current.
- logicalfails 2y ago
  Any good books or sources on this? I would be interested to read more
  - bschne 2y ago
    +1, wasn’t aware of this, curious to learn more
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- InvisibleUp 2y ago
  It also didn’t help matters that Stalin was greatly opposed to cybernetics, resulting in no research done on the topic until 1954, the year after he died. And even then, things didn’t really kick off until 1958.
- vegabook 2y ago
  See: intel / iphone
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
I can't imagine any salesperson making a statement like that!
- bluGill 2y ago
  Sometimes they will - when they are predicting who might buy and thus how much they need to make to hit their numbers. No salesman want to have unmeetable sales goals. still rare though.
tbrownaw 2y ago
It may be apocryphal, but it's not all that wrong. Those "about five" computers even have names: AWS, Azure, GCP, ...
- ghaff 2y ago
  Sun’s CTO repurposed the quote to make exactly that point in the 2000s, likely before any of those existed. It’s very much an oversimplification but if you squint it’s not totally wrong either.
  - lysace 2y ago
    Sounds like something Jonathan Schwartz (the ponytailed COO @ Sun at the time, I believe) could have said, did you mean him? His blog was strangely addictive at the time. Great writer.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      No, I'm sure it was Greg though I don't think you can get to the Sun blogs any longer. But that's not to say that Jonathan didn't reuse the line himself. (I was an IT industry analyst at the time--and am again.) Ah, but here's a reference to it: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/the-world-needs-only-five-computers/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/the-world-needs-only... I'm guessing it was when Sun started talking up Sun Grid though that part I'm not sure of but the timeframe of Stephen's article pretty much matches.
      - lysace 2y ago
        Ah! Oh, Stephen Shankland. He did a number of high quality reviews of this software product I was the tech lead on; about 10-15 years ago. High quality software reviews were rare already back then.
        ghaff 2y ago
        I know Stephen very well. He's a good guy. He's leading content for Commonwealth Fusion Systems these days.
js98 2y ago
This website is unreadable on mobile.
thayne 2y ago
> Some people question how much of the internet is a place that documents history, and how much of the internet is a place that writes and recreates history. So, basically the same as things written before the internet existed. It's not like people didn't write down myths and legends on paper, or stone tablets for that matter.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > It's not like people didn't write down myths and legends on paper, or stone tablets for that matter. Across broad swathes of the planet (i.e. all of the Americas), they did not (until very very recently in the overall scheme of human history)
  - samatman 2y ago
    *most of the Americas.
unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
IBM confirmed they went into a sales cycle in 1953 expecting to sell five units of their first machine, the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine. We don't know precisely how or to whom this estimate of five units was conveyed beforehand, but the gist of the statement appears likely.
metalman 2y ago
The way things are going this might be an over estimate, what with the possibility of a space based completely stable billion cubit QPU's, beaming all out data around with lasers, 3 might do it.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet." -George Washington
PeterStuer 2y ago
A litle bit more cloud consolidation and you could argue we're nearly there.
dr_dshiv 2y ago
I had thought, but perhaps incorrectly, that it was JCR licklider when discussing time sharing computers. The idea that you could have massive computing centers that were serving world needs… Sounds ridiculous, but then AWS, Google, Microsoft… I can’t find it right now, so I’ll have to leave it to others, but his “Man Computer Symbiosis” paper from 1960 is amazing and you probably ought to read it in light of recent tech… https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1960_-_Man-Computer_Symbiosis.pdf https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1960_-_Man-Computer_Sy...
jvandonsel 2y ago
"I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them." - Professor Frink
codeulike 2y ago
There are similar statements from other people in the computing field around that time https://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/predictive-text-darwins-ibm-computers.html https://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/predictive-text-dar... Sir Charles Darwin (grandson of the naturalist) who was head of the UK’s computer research centre, the NPL (National Physical Laboratory) said in 1946: “it is very possible that … one machine would suffice to solve all the problems that are demanded of it from the whole country” Douglas Hartree, Mathematician and early UK computer pioneer said in 1950: "We have a computer here in Cambridge, one in Manchester and one at the [NPL]. I suppose there ought to be one in Scotland, but that's about all." This 1969 talk by Lord Bowden about the 1950s explains the thinking behind that statement: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/literature/reports/p014.htm https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/literature/reports/... I went to see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential analysers in England and had more experience in using these very specialised computers than anyone else. He told me that, in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built - one in Cambridge, one in Teddington and one in Manchester. Noone else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them. He added that machines were exceedingly difficult to use, and could not be trusted to anyone who was not a professional mathematician, and he advised Ferranti to get out of the business and abandon the idea of selling any more. It is amazing how completely wrong a great man can be.
- rvense 2y ago
  It's easy to laugh at quotes like this, but they really had a different understanding of the word computer than we do. These machines were in fact huge and required specialists to use and didn't really do much except calculate. It's fairer to say that they were misjudging what computers would become. I'm not sure I can say that I would have been able to look at an early 1950's computer and imagine a 1960's DEC or IBM machine under every bank, or whatever, much less desktop publishing or Defender of the Crown...
  - codeulike 2y ago
    Oh yes definitely. But its fascinating because its looking back at the dawn of a completely new thing in the world, and how hard it was for people to see where it was going to go. Interestingly if you look back at Alan Turing's writing around that time, he seemed to have a much better grasp of what a _big_deal_ this was all going to be. It would be amazing to go and fetch Turing with a time machine and bring him to our time. Show him an iPhone, his face on the UK £50 note, and Wikipedia's list of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_openly_LGBT_heads_of_state_and_government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_openly_LGBT_heads_of_s...

131 points by bschne 2y ago

amelius 2y ago

"is", not "will only ever be"

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
TheCoelacanth 2y ago
The worldwide part is also made up. He wasn't talking about the entire world market, just the companies they tried to sell to on one specific marketing campaign.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

Leading contender for actual quote: "... we expected to get orders for five [IBM 701] machines, we came home with orders for 18."

hinkley 2y ago
Out of the 20 potential customers they pitched to. So they were counting on a 25% success rate and got 90%.
- thmsths 2y ago
  I wonder if it caused any issues. Getting 3 times the amount of orders can be great, but it can also be pyrrhic victory, depending on your ability to deliver.
  - t0mas88 2y ago
    With this order size there is no public pricing information. So if you can't deliver fast enough you would adjust prices or specifically charge more for the first few delivery slots. Compare it to ordering very high price items with long lead time like airliners, you pay for a specific delivery slot, not just the item at a random moment. And you can buy options to more deliveries in a specific timeframe, which influences the price of your order.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    At the time (if TFA is correct) the 701 had already existed for a year. So it was only a question of building more of them, not that they had sold 5 vs 18 of something that didn't exist yet. But, they were also most likely on the hook for installing and running them -- at that time a computer like that would have been leased with installation services and on-site operations staff included.
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    No, it did not cause any issues.
  - bityard 2y ago
    From a salescritter's perspective, that is frankly not their problem.
graymatters 2y ago
The premise of the article (if it can be called that) is incorrect. He made the statement about the 5 computers in a TV interview (and it was not related to business trip referred in the article). I saw the recording of the interview some 10-15 years ago. Don’t remember which network. Perhaps NBC?
- anamexis 2y ago
  Well, the article is certainly better sourced than you thinking you saw a counter example 10-15 years ago on TV.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago
  What you say doesn’t make sense at all. The article describes a shareholder meeting in 1953, when IBM was already aware that the market is much bigger. It had to happen significantly earlier, but not later than in 1940s, because the concept of programmable electronic machine (a computer, not calculator) was established only then. And they were selling a lot of calculators by then. At that time there was no such thing as TV broadcasting casually interviewing various people.

ecshafer 2y ago

I haven't thought about this much before, but I think it must be a myth. Going from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM wiki on the history of Wikipedia, there were "Computing machines" in the 30s referring to their calculators and tabulating machines. IBM was already selling more than 5 of these devices, so if the 1943 date was true, it makes no sense. So it referring to a single machine having a market of 5 devices, that might be true.

potato3732842 2y ago
Yeah, there were so many specialist analog computing machines out there in the 1940s and earlier that the pop culture interpretation of the quote as being "for all digital computers of all types the world over" just doesn't pass the sniff test.
veqq 2y ago
In the 60s, you'd have offices with thousands of such machines: https://aurorasginjoint.com/2017/08/19/a-look-at-billy-wilders-the-apartment-office-wise/ https://aurorasginjoint.com/2017/08/19/a-look-at-billy-wilde... (in the movie, he mentions 30k employees on all the floors). On this floor, I believe they're mechanical calculators with extra functions (unsure what).
mixmastamyk 2y ago
There were already more than five electro-mechanical computers built by the end of WWII. And several electronic ones, shortly after that. So the paraphrase is indeed nonsense.

Analemma_ 2y ago

People really love apocryphal quotes that portray famous or disliked figures as morons. Bill Gates never said "640k ought to be enough for anybody" either, yet that circulates to this day.

ciberado 2y ago
On the other hand, sometimes se non è vero, è ben trovato. We need stories. Models. The Gandhi we know was not the real one, same for Churchill or any other person, and the same thing happens with some villains. My personal point of view is that apocryphal quotes are just an extension of that mechanism, and can be useful in the construction of our thoughts.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  Sure, but the formula is so clunky. Just take: A) a person famous for their brilliance or other quality B) a humdrum everyday failing experienced by regular people, such as hubris, poor ability to predict the future, problems in school, difficulty in relationships, etc. Mix them together and you get "Einstein flunked math in primary school" and Freud saying "who knows what women want" and other stuff. I'm all for stories, but these aren't very good ones.
  - lynguist 2y ago
    Nah the formula is different: 1. Take some conditional and true statement: “The original IBM PC can address 1024KB memory of which 640KB are in user space.” 2. Remove all conditionalities: “The PC has 640KB RAM as that’s all one needs.” 3. Attribute it to a famous figure: “Bill Gates said that 640K is all anyone ought to need.”
bitwize 2y ago
Today, 4 GiB, which was enough to run an entire university back in the 90s, is what the most rinky-dink Wal-Mart special laptops come with and Windows barely runs at all on that much. If Bill Gates had said "640k ought to be enough for everybody", at the time he could hardly be blamed for doing so, as single-user desktop machines of the day still typically shipped with 1/10 or 1/5 that much.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bitwize 2y ago

As I understand it... one of the reasons why the Soviets fell behind in computer technology was because back in the 60s, while Soviet engineers had good designs that were state-of-the-art for the era, the communist economic planners estimated the requirements for computer manufacture to be one per university or government department for a total of maybe a few thousand, while Western manufacturers were getting orders into the tens or hundreds of thousands... and they had to come up with new technologies to produce the machines faster and cheaper in order to keep up, let alone compete with other manufacturers. So the market in the west grew explosively, requiring concomitant growth in innovation, and that put the Soviets on the back foot, requiring them to smuggle in and reverse engineer System/370s, PDPs, etc. in order to stay current.

logicalfails 2y ago
Any good books or sources on this? I would be interested to read more
- bschne 2y ago
  +1, wasn’t aware of this, curious to learn more
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
InvisibleUp 2y ago
It also didn’t help matters that Stalin was greatly opposed to cybernetics, resulting in no research done on the topic until 1954, the year after he died. And even then, things didn’t really kick off until 1958.
vegabook 2y ago
See: intel / iphone

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago

I can't imagine any salesperson making a statement like that!

bluGill 2y ago
Sometimes they will - when they are predicting who might buy and thus how much they need to make to hit their numbers. No salesman want to have unmeetable sales goals. still rare though.

tbrownaw 2y ago

It may be apocryphal, but it's not all that wrong. Those "about five" computers even have names: AWS, Azure, GCP, ...

ghaff 2y ago
Sun’s CTO repurposed the quote to make exactly that point in the 2000s, likely before any of those existed. It’s very much an oversimplification but if you squint it’s not totally wrong either.
- lysace 2y ago
  Sounds like something Jonathan Schwartz (the ponytailed COO @ Sun at the time, I believe) could have said, did you mean him? His blog was strangely addictive at the time. Great writer.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    No, I'm sure it was Greg though I don't think you can get to the Sun blogs any longer. But that's not to say that Jonathan didn't reuse the line himself. (I was an IT industry analyst at the time--and am again.) Ah, but here's a reference to it: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/the-world-needs-only-five-computers/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/the-world-needs-only... I'm guessing it was when Sun started talking up Sun Grid though that part I'm not sure of but the timeframe of Stephen's article pretty much matches.
    - lysace 2y ago
      Ah! Oh, Stephen Shankland. He did a number of high quality reviews of this software product I was the tech lead on; about 10-15 years ago. High quality software reviews were rare already back then.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        I know Stephen very well. He's a good guy. He's leading content for Commonwealth Fusion Systems these days.

js98 2y ago

This website is unreadable on mobile.

thayne 2y ago

> Some people question how much of the internet is a place that documents history, and how much of the internet is a place that writes and recreates history. So, basically the same as things written before the internet existed. It's not like people didn't write down myths and legends on paper, or stone tablets for that matter.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
> It's not like people didn't write down myths and legends on paper, or stone tablets for that matter. Across broad swathes of the planet (i.e. all of the Americas), they did not (until very very recently in the overall scheme of human history)
- samatman 2y ago
  *most of the Americas.

unyttigfjelltol 2y ago

IBM confirmed they went into a sales cycle in 1953 expecting to sell five units of their first machine, the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine. We don't know precisely how or to whom this estimate of five units was conveyed beforehand, but the gist of the statement appears likely.

metalman 2y ago

The way things are going this might be an over estimate, what with the possibility of a space based completely stable billion cubit QPU's, beaming all out data around with lasers, 3 might do it.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet." -George Washington

PeterStuer 2y ago

A litle bit more cloud consolidation and you could argue we're nearly there.

dr_dshiv 2y ago

I had thought, but perhaps incorrectly, that it was JCR licklider when discussing time sharing computers. The idea that you could have massive computing centers that were serving world needs… Sounds ridiculous, but then AWS, Google, Microsoft… I can’t find it right now, so I’ll have to leave it to others, but his “Man Computer Symbiosis” paper from 1960 is amazing and you probably ought to read it in light of recent tech… https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1960_-_Man-Computer_Symbiosis.pdf https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1960_-_Man-Computer_Sy...

jvandonsel 2y ago

"I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them." - Professor Frink

codeulike 2y ago

There are similar statements from other people in the computing field around that time https://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/predictive-text-darwins-ibm-computers.html https://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/predictive-text-dar... Sir Charles Darwin (grandson of the naturalist) who was head of the UK’s computer research centre, the NPL (National Physical Laboratory) said in 1946: “it is very possible that … one machine would suffice to solve all the problems that are demanded of it from the whole country” Douglas Hartree, Mathematician and early UK computer pioneer said in 1950: "We have a computer here in Cambridge, one in Manchester and one at the [NPL]. I suppose there ought to be one in Scotland, but that's about all." This 1969 talk by Lord Bowden about the 1950s explains the thinking behind that statement: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/literature/reports/p014.htm https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/literature/reports/... I went to see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential analysers in England and had more experience in using these very specialised computers than anyone else. He told me that, in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built - one in Cambridge, one in Teddington and one in Manchester. Noone else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them. He added that machines were exceedingly difficult to use, and could not be trusted to anyone who was not a professional mathematician, and he advised Ferranti to get out of the business and abandon the idea of selling any more. It is amazing how completely wrong a great man can be.

rvense 2y ago
It's easy to laugh at quotes like this, but they really had a different understanding of the word computer than we do. These machines were in fact huge and required specialists to use and didn't really do much except calculate. It's fairer to say that they were misjudging what computers would become. I'm not sure I can say that I would have been able to look at an early 1950's computer and imagine a 1960's DEC or IBM machine under every bank, or whatever, much less desktop publishing or Defender of the Crown...
- codeulike 2y ago
  Oh yes definitely. But its fascinating because its looking back at the dawn of a completely new thing in the world, and how hard it was for people to see where it was going to go. Interestingly if you look back at Alan Turing's writing around that time, he seemed to have a much better grasp of what a _big_deal_ this was all going to be. It would be amazing to go and fetch Turing with a time machine and bring him to our time. Show him an iPhone, his face on the UK £50 note, and Wikipedia's list of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_openly_LGBT_heads_of_state_and_government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_openly_LGBT_heads_of_s...