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Time flash

1981

Thirteen million computers have found a new owner, each year 200 billion dollar is spent on the IT technology.

He you look at the processing power that all these machines posses it is the equivalent of a million people 24 hours a day using a 1000 kg of paper per second!

The miniaturization can be compared to write a bible on a nail head

In the USA computers do 100.000 transactions per person per second.

In average a name appears somewhere on a screen 35 times a day in the USA alone.

Discussion on the 640K limit

In the interest of objectivity there are a few points to discuss about this statement.

Did or did not Mr. Bill Gates say:

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

He himself strongly denies to have ever said that, despite the rumors that continues to rattle the internet community.
There is no witness, apart from himself, to confirm that he did or did not say it.
Even if he did say this you have to see it in the light of the state of the art of these days:

memory was extremely expensive. ($300 for 64K yes K!)
programs were still very small. So why would you settle for more than you will "ever" need.
The 16bit Intel 8086 or 8088 processor could only address 640Kb (2^16 = 65536) and that's where DOS originally was programmed for.
In this epoch programmers still thought that they were making programs for eternity to come, they were wrong. The average lifetime of a piece of software is about 3 years! Every 18 or so months we have a new processor etc..

So in this light it is easily to defend that "640K ought to be enough". That all of us proved to be wrong somewhere on the line of the IT trails leaves no discussion open. There were only a few visionaries (Nostradamus, Jules Verne, Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart and a few others) who seemed to have had a connection with the future.

And what's wrong with making a mistake?!

Last Updated on February 6, 2004

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Footnotes & References

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