I follow a lot of blogs and one of them belongs to Colin Jackson. In his latest post he says:

“This is like saying, back in the 1980s, that no-one would ever use more than 640 k of RAM in their computer. Bill Gates said that, by the way, and computer designs paid the price for a decade”

I have seen this “640K quote” literally hundreds of times over the years but I was surprised to see Colin referencing it because it’s not true. Bill never said it. This makes Colin’s nebulous “and computer designs paid the price for a decade” comment look a little shaky too but let’s not go there for now.

In 1997 Wired magazine wrote an article on the infamous “640K quote” and determined it was a fabrication:

“Silly quotations do have a way of floating like rumors. Well, the truth starts here. He never said it”

The Wikiquote entry for Bill contains a couple of references he has made to the 640K limitation:

“I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within—oh five or six years people were complaining”

“Do you realize the pain the industry went through while the IBM PC was limited to 640K? The machine was going to be 512K at one point, and we kept pushing it up. I never said that statement — I said the opposite of that”

And a direct rebuttal:

“I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again”

Unfortunately Colin’s blog post which contained the quote is a transcript of a radio interview he did which means he’s done a wonderful job of perpetuating the myth. I’ve spent some time talking with Colin in the past and I know he’s a stickler for accuracy so I’m hopeful he’ll do the decent thing and retract his comment. Saying the same thing over and over doesn’t make it true.