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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

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.
bombcar 2y ago
Even if Gates never said it, someone involved in the design of DOS decided that 640k would be the demarcation between normal memory and "reserved". So somebody, somewhere, decided that 640k was "good enough" vs 700k or whatever.
- layer8 2y ago
  It was decided by IBM for the IBM PC. The 8088 CPU had 1 MB of addressable memory, and some of it had to be reserved for the BIOS ROM, video hardware, and other expansion cards. So the exact limit was a trade-off between application RAM and hardware expansions. You could also phrase it as “384 KB is enough for BIOS and expansion cards”. Moreover, 640K is kind of a natural division point in hexadecimal notation. Address segments in the 8088 memory model were 64K, hence segments 00000–90000 were for RAM, and segments A0000–F0000 were for ROM and hardware.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    There were so many gymnastics to get a bit more memory to work with. Multiple autoexec.bat and config.sys files for many games and the like.
    - netRebel 2y ago
      Exactly that got me into my current career. I, too, juggled drivers as a kid to get Wing Commander/Doom etc. to actually start.
- bitwize 2y ago
  More like someone at IBM. The memory map mapped BIOS, video, and PCjr cartridge memory into the upper memory area. Other contemporaneous, non-IBM-compatible x86 systems of the era could relax this restriction. The Tandy 2000 loaded its BIOS from disk (instead of having it in ROM) and ran MS-DOS (indeed, its BIOS API was IBM-compatible even though hardware wise it was not), and could access up to 768K of user memory flat out (896K with aftermarket expansions). This briefly gave it an advantage handling large spreadsheets and the like.
mywittyname 2y ago
And they never pass the smell test. Clearly the Chairman of IBM in the 50s doesn't believe they will only ever sell 5 computers. What would be the point in investing all of those resources into building anything with that sort of limit? It's obvious to anyone who understands business and takes a few seconds to consider the quote that he's likely talking about a specific product that is currently priced out of the market. The 5 in that statement is probably sourced from looking at their current clients and seeing A) who could afford such a machine and B) for which of those clients does buying the 701 make clear economic sense? The 20 companies they pitched to probably fell into category A, but they just miscalculated how many of those fell into category B. The goal was to drive down costs through economies of scale.
- II2II 2y ago
  I don't like the smell test because the smell test usually depends upon hindsight. Granted, I also don't like how most of these (supposed) quotes are interpreted: as a foolish lack of insight from industry leaders. Take actual IBM quote in context. Not only was the 701 a tube based machine, memory was a huge problem at the time, and computers were still being designed for business or scientific applications. The 701 was a scientific machine. It's use was pretty much limited to univiersities and military applications. It doesn't much matter wheter the number was 5 or 18 or 500, the potential market was limited. On the other hand, I doubt that IBM held similar views on machines targetted at the business market. Given how early in the history of programmable digital computers this was, it wasn't entirely clear the situation would change. That took the development of integrated circuits for both logic and memory. (The transistor may have been a prerequisite for the development of ICs, but they were insufficient for the development of computers that were accessible to anyone outside of major institutions. They were simply too expensive to reliably manufacture at scale.)
nonrandomstring 2y ago
Having a single person to identify with an idea via a quote or famous formula is a very human kind of shorthand we love. People still say "Edison invented the light bulb", even though we know that's not strictly true at all. People love revisionism in general. Equally we like it when doubt is cast on revered icons to take them down a peg. Or when grand villains and "found to be not as wicked as we once thought". We love treasured theories being overturned. We live in an age on the last frontier of truth, where any controversial claim that throws mud on a cherished belief is popular, just for it's iconoclasm. Meanwhile I think smart people say "I don't care if it's actually true or not." Did Jesus or Plato or Cicero or Machiavelli actually say that? Who cares? It doesn't matter. If it's a good story that makes a clear point or illustrates an idea, then it's useful. So long as it's not something deeply offensive or unfair to attribute, whether Watson actually said it is irrelevant. It speaks to a more abstract truth about scale and underestimates. It's the kind of fallible thing he would have said... might have said.... maybe should have said! As a famous businessman Watson would no doubt be proud to own that and have it associated with his name, even if slightly erroneously.
rqtwteye 2y ago
A lot of Einstein quotes are either misquoted and/or not by him. Same for Churchill. Even the current news likes to pick quotes out of context. Trump says a lot of dumb things but often when I hear the full context of something people are mad about, he didn't say that. I am sure the right wingers do the same.
- hatthew 2y ago
  As Abraham Lincoln once said, "Don't believe everything you read on the internet."
- schoen 2y ago
  See also https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/ https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/ ("I Can't Believe It's Not Buddha!"). A huge genre!
- fuzztester 2y ago
  the quote about Einstein, relativity and his driver is very cool. this is one link for it, there are others: https://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/yarns/836402-2024-03/ https://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/yarns/836...
  - rqtwteye 2y ago
    Cute story. It even wouldn’t be out of character for him.

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.

bombcar 2y ago

Even if Gates never said it, someone involved in the design of DOS decided that 640k would be the demarcation between normal memory and "reserved". So somebody, somewhere, decided that 640k was "good enough" vs 700k or whatever.

layer8 2y ago
It was decided by IBM for the IBM PC. The 8088 CPU had 1 MB of addressable memory, and some of it had to be reserved for the BIOS ROM, video hardware, and other expansion cards. So the exact limit was a trade-off between application RAM and hardware expansions. You could also phrase it as “384 KB is enough for BIOS and expansion cards”. Moreover, 640K is kind of a natural division point in hexadecimal notation. Address segments in the 8088 memory model were 64K, hence segments 00000–90000 were for RAM, and segments A0000–F0000 were for ROM and hardware.
- ghaff 2y ago
  There were so many gymnastics to get a bit more memory to work with. Multiple autoexec.bat and config.sys files for many games and the like.
  - netRebel 2y ago
    Exactly that got me into my current career. I, too, juggled drivers as a kid to get Wing Commander/Doom etc. to actually start.
bitwize 2y ago
More like someone at IBM. The memory map mapped BIOS, video, and PCjr cartridge memory into the upper memory area. Other contemporaneous, non-IBM-compatible x86 systems of the era could relax this restriction. The Tandy 2000 loaded its BIOS from disk (instead of having it in ROM) and ran MS-DOS (indeed, its BIOS API was IBM-compatible even though hardware wise it was not), and could access up to 768K of user memory flat out (896K with aftermarket expansions). This briefly gave it an advantage handling large spreadsheets and the like.

mywittyname 2y ago

And they never pass the smell test. Clearly the Chairman of IBM in the 50s doesn't believe they will only ever sell 5 computers. What would be the point in investing all of those resources into building anything with that sort of limit? It's obvious to anyone who understands business and takes a few seconds to consider the quote that he's likely talking about a specific product that is currently priced out of the market. The 5 in that statement is probably sourced from looking at their current clients and seeing A) who could afford such a machine and B) for which of those clients does buying the 701 make clear economic sense? The 20 companies they pitched to probably fell into category A, but they just miscalculated how many of those fell into category B. The goal was to drive down costs through economies of scale.

II2II 2y ago
I don't like the smell test because the smell test usually depends upon hindsight. Granted, I also don't like how most of these (supposed) quotes are interpreted: as a foolish lack of insight from industry leaders. Take actual IBM quote in context. Not only was the 701 a tube based machine, memory was a huge problem at the time, and computers were still being designed for business or scientific applications. The 701 was a scientific machine. It's use was pretty much limited to univiersities and military applications. It doesn't much matter wheter the number was 5 or 18 or 500, the potential market was limited. On the other hand, I doubt that IBM held similar views on machines targetted at the business market. Given how early in the history of programmable digital computers this was, it wasn't entirely clear the situation would change. That took the development of integrated circuits for both logic and memory. (The transistor may have been a prerequisite for the development of ICs, but they were insufficient for the development of computers that were accessible to anyone outside of major institutions. They were simply too expensive to reliably manufacture at scale.)

nonrandomstring 2y ago

Having a single person to identify with an idea via a quote or famous formula is a very human kind of shorthand we love. People still say "Edison invented the light bulb", even though we know that's not strictly true at all. People love revisionism in general. Equally we like it when doubt is cast on revered icons to take them down a peg. Or when grand villains and "found to be not as wicked as we once thought". We love treasured theories being overturned. We live in an age on the last frontier of truth, where any controversial claim that throws mud on a cherished belief is popular, just for it's iconoclasm. Meanwhile I think smart people say "I don't care if it's actually true or not." Did Jesus or Plato or Cicero or Machiavelli actually say that? Who cares? It doesn't matter. If it's a good story that makes a clear point or illustrates an idea, then it's useful. So long as it's not something deeply offensive or unfair to attribute, whether Watson actually said it is irrelevant. It speaks to a more abstract truth about scale and underestimates. It's the kind of fallible thing he would have said... might have said.... maybe should have said! As a famous businessman Watson would no doubt be proud to own that and have it associated with his name, even if slightly erroneously.

rqtwteye 2y ago

A lot of Einstein quotes are either misquoted and/or not by him. Same for Churchill. Even the current news likes to pick quotes out of context. Trump says a lot of dumb things but often when I hear the full context of something people are mad about, he didn't say that. I am sure the right wingers do the same.

hatthew 2y ago
As Abraham Lincoln once said, "Don't believe everything you read on the internet."
schoen 2y ago
See also https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/ https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/ ("I Can't Believe It's Not Buddha!"). A huge genre!
fuzztester 2y ago
the quote about Einstein, relativity and his driver is very cool. this is one link for it, there are others: https://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/yarns/836402-2024-03/ https://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/yarns/836...
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  Cute story. It even wouldn’t be out of character for him.