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Comment by parineum | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't really need this much explanation.

People take these quotes out of context all the time. Said in a business context, there was no need, at that time, for someone to have a personal computer.

There's no business justification in 1977 for a personal computer department at a business. It's similar to the gates quote about RAM (I think it was 64KB?).

These statements aren't meant to be forever quotes. Their business plan quotes.

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> It's similar to the gates quote about RAM (I think it was 64KB?)

640, and Bill Gates said he either never said that, or at least never remembered having said it. I think there is no evidence anywhere that he did.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563853/the-640k-quote...

That exact quote? No, never. He said something like: current computers at the time had 64kb of RAM, so the OS was designed with a limit of 640kb, and he believed this would give them 10 years of future proofing. As it happened, that limit was reached much faster, in about 6 years.

MS-DOS didn't create that limit; the physical memory map of the 5150 did. So Microsoft (and Gates) would not have made that decision.

You are right. The quote must have been slightly different then. I'm sure about the 10 years part.

Or maybe he simply made a mistake. Big deal. This doesn't speak negatively of his other achievements.

He had a long career and presumably many successes, and is fallible like the rest of us. But a half-remembered zinger with no context makes for zippier posts I guess.

The early popularity of Minitel, the continued popularity of ssh/tmux, and the web browser itself indicates that bespoke client applications are not the only way. He wasn’t directionally wrong.

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