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"just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu" Is there a bigger understatement in tech history? It certainly rivals Thomas Watson's alleged quote of
by mathattack 13y ago
"just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu"
Is there a bigger understatement in tech history? It certainly rivals Thomas Watson's alleged quote of the world market being "Approximately 5 computers".
- mongol 13y agoWhen he said that, did he mean "for all eternity" or "in the next fiscal year"?
- twic 13y agoOh, i don't know. He turned out 50% right.
- ErikAugust 13y agoIf we think of PCs as terminals and clusters of servers as "one computer" it's not way far off.
- reinhardt 13y agoI read the GP as referring to Linux being 50% right in the "big and professional" prediction.
- eksith 13y agoIf we take "Cloud" to mean "Computer" or rather "Disparate systems functioning as one", then he's almost right. How many people use AWS or Google Apps now? If it's true that more and more services are moving to the cloud and this trend won't change, there may well be "Approximately 5 computers" some time in the future.
- mseebach 13y agoIf we radically change the meaning of "right" then he's almost right. If right keeps its commonly accepted meaning then he's wrong. Even if we accept that AWS and Google is each one computer, there's still the ~3 devices of an average techie (smartphone, tablet, one or more laptops or desktop computers), all of which are definitely computers and works fully independently, we're going to end up many orders of magnitude north of "5".