For many years now, a short-sighted prediction allegedly made by the founder of Microsoft in 1981 has been circulating on the Internet and literature. We checked to see if Bill Gates said this.

This is the text circulated on the social network "VKontakte": “In 1981, four years before the advent of Microsoft Windows, at the initial stage of the collaboration between Microsoft and IBM, Bill Gates said the following: “640 KB should be enough for any task!”
We were talking about a feature of early Intel microprocessors, where in a single megabyte of address space 640 KB were allocated for RAM. Back then 640 KB seemed incredible!
Today we understand that even the most outstanding minds who stood at the origins of modern IT did not imagine how rapid and all-consuming the development of computer technology would be.
Now we carry phones in our pockets, which are many times more powerful than the first computers, and schoolchildren have smart watches on their wrists, the functionality of which is much more extensive than that of any gadget of the times of Bill Gates.”

The statement attributed to Gates can be found on various Internet portals (Gameinonline.com, Peoples.ru, iXBT.com, "Culture.rf"), in the lists most unfortunate predictions, collections of aphorisms and printed books (“The Age of Longevity: An Active and Happy Life at Any Age”, “Business without rules. How to destroy stereotypes and make super profits", "Big Encyclopedia of Computer and Internet").

Even people far from this area know that computer technology has made great strides over the past four decades. August 12, 1981 IBM released your first personal computer. The IBM 5150 model was expandable to 256 KB of RAM and cost about $3,000. An audio cassette was used to load and save data, a floppy disk was optional, and a hard drive was not supported. In the next line (model 5160, 1983), the RAM could be expanded to the notorious 640 KB. Today's most modest smartphones look like supercomputers compared to those PCs. But it is important to note that Microsoft, which developed the MS-DOS operating system, responded to this limitation had no relation — it was originally architectural, that is, it came from IBM.

It is also known that the former richest man on the planet, Bill Gates, made not the most accurate predictions at various times, such as:

"I believe that OS/2 is destined to become the most important operating system and perhaps the best software of all time" (spoken in 1987);
“We will never release a 32-bit operating system” (said in 1989, four years before the advent of Windows NT);
“In two years the spam problem will be solved” (statement was made in 2004).

Gates himself is not shy about such kicks, and in 1996 in one of the newspapers he even stated: “I sometimes said stupid things and wrong things...” The quote also has a continuation: “...But not this one. No one who works with computers will ever say that a certain amount of memory will be enough for all times. Memory demands increase as computers and software become more powerful. In fact, every couple of years, the amount of memory address space required to run any currently popular software roughly doubles. This is well known."

So, 26 years ago Bill Gates said that he didn’t say anything like that about 640 KB. But let's see how the spread of this quote began in the first place. The earliest mention of it was found by the Quote Investigator website in one of the oldest publications dedicated to information technology - the magazine InfoWorld. It is dated April 29, 1985. James Fawcett began his editorial column with an epigraph: “When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640 kilobytes, we thought that no one would ever need that much memory (William Gates, Microsoft executive).”

The editor did not specify where or under what circumstances Gates made this statement. And although similar opinions were voiced more than once in the 80s from others, not so authoritative persons, the 640 KB version is first found in print in connection with him. Also, in this quote (even if it is genuine), Bill Gates is not claiming that he ever openly spoke about the sufficiency of 640 KB, he is simply sharing his previous thoughts. However, this did not prevent the authors of the same publication from distorting the quote in subsequent years - compare. Number InfoWorld November 14, 1988: “Microsoft CEO Bill Gates once said that 640 KB of memory is more than anyone needs. He was wrong"; number InfoWorld January 1, 1990: “640 KB should be enough for everyone” (Bill Gates).

However, there is a quote that definitely belongs to Gates. In 1989, he gave a speech on information technology to the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo. That's what he is stated: “I must say that in 1981, making these decisions, I felt that I was giving enough freedom for ten years. So going from 64 KB to 640 KB seemed like something that would take a very long time. Well, that didn’t happen—it only took about six years before people started to see it as a real problem.”

And already in the mid-90s, Gates’ “rash quote” began to be included in all sorts of lists of blunders. For example, in the article "If only they knew" (Washington Post, November 16, 1995). And this despite the fact that he stated about the incorrect presentation of information in the form of a quote.

Thus, a general conclusion can be drawn. There is no evidence that Bill Gates in 1981 claimed that 640 KB of memory was sufficient. Moreover, he himself denies such a formulation. At the same time, he clearly believed that this amount of memory would last for a long time. Moreover, “for a long time” does not equal “forever.”

Cover image: VKontakte»