640k is Enough For Anyone
Back in the day, I used to always love mentioning the supposed quote from Bill Gates, which would have marked him as significantly short-sighted: “640k is more memory than anyone will ever need”, or some close variant thereof.
We love to quote it, because we love to hate Bill Gates and yet we can relate with the amazement of ever greater RAM requirements. For instance, I never thought when my powerhouse Mac came with 128MB of RAM that one day I would have a Mac with a video card holding more RAM than that! Insert similar nostalgic reflection here, ad nauseam.
Well, now I can just feel stupid and short-sighted without pointing the finger at Bill Gates. I never even thought to verify the quote until today for some unknown reason I decided to. Sure enough, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an official citation, and Bill Gates denied ever saying that.
February 12th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
This quote is used by many and is often dated as 1981. There seems to be some confusion as this was around the time that Commodore replaced the VIC 20 having 8K with the Commodore 64 with 64K. Their slogan was “More memory than anyone will ever need.” I can’t imagine anyone was thinking we would ever need 640K at that time and now you can buy a 1TB storage drive for $250. Who da thunk?
February 4th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
The VIC-20 had 3.5KB. Just to set the record straight
January 16th, 2010 at 7:25 pm
The VIC had 5K of ram, 3.5 of which was available for basic programs and data and it was even less if you bitmapped the screen.