History 2001: “640K Ought to Be Enough fo Anybody”

Were these words, laughable today, truly uttered by Bill Gates? They’re certainly attributed to him often enough.

When asked in 1996 by Bloomberg Business News in 1996, he denied the citation.

His response: “I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not this. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time. The need for memory increases as computers get more potent and software gets more powerful. In fact, every couple of years the amount of memory address space needed to run whatever software is mainstream at the time just about doubles. This is well-known. When IBM introduced its PC in 1981, many people attacked Microsoft for its role. These critics said that 8-bit computers, which had 64K of address space, would last forever. They said we were wastefully thowing out great 8-bit programming by moving the world toward 16-bit computers. We at Microsoft disagreed. We knew that even 16-bit computers, which had 640K of available address space, would be adequate for only 4 or 5 years. (The IBM PC had 1MB of logical address space. But 384K of this was assigned to special purposes, leaving 640K of memory available. That’s where the now-infamous ‘640K barrier’ came from.) A few years later, Microsoft was a big fan of Intel’s 386 microprocessor chip, which gave computers a 32-bit address space. Modern OSs can now take advantage of that seemingly vast potential memory. But even 32 bits of address space won’t prove adequate as time goes on. Meanwhile, 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.”

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 157 on February 2001 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.