During the first years of the personal-computer revolution, Bill Gates didn’t say “640K [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody,” but nonetheless his supposed prediction is perhaps the most famous in Internet lore. There is an underlying truth to it, as Gates was never much of a visionary. His 1995 treatise The Road Ahead famously had to be reworked soon after its release because Gates’ forward-looking prose had failed to predict the Internet, which was rising up beneath his feet as he wrote.

But Gates wasn’t such a dullard to think that a finite amount of memory would serve humanity’s computing needs forever. So where did the quote come from? Author and librarian Fred Shapiro is trying to figure it out. He wants to find out either who spoke the words or who was the first to misattribute the quote to Gates.

I’d focus my search around the late 1980s, when 640K was a significant barrier and was viewed as a major limitation of Microsoft’s MS-DOS, among other operating systems. Take this 1987 Usenet thread in which users dream of a DOS that can address more than 640K of memory.

Expanded memory is the only way to get around 640k in PC-DOS 3.3. Microsoft claims that MS-DOS 3.3 is “functionally equivalent” to PC-DOS 3.3. Ergo, it is 99.99999999999999999% certain that the 640k barrier remains.

Though it’s not explicitly stated, it’s clear from the thread that users were annoyed by an apparent attitude in the computer industry that breaking out of the 640K space was not a pressing need. It wouldn’t have been a big leap for that general irritation to morph into a “direct quote.”

This 1990 thread on the topic shows how the notion of 640K as a symbol of poor foresight had established itself in the consciousness of hobbyists, but Gates is nowhere to be found:

IBM really messed things up when they designed the original PC (hindsight is wonderful!) - they didn’t think that anyone would ever need more than 640k of memory.

Indeed, I always remembered the 640K canard being pinned on IBM—it wasn’t until the late 1990s/early 2000s, when Microsoft’s dominance was unquestioned, that I started hearing it attributed to Bill Gates. It makes sense: In 1990, IBM would have been the more satisfying target. Perhaps in another few years, we’ll cite the 640K quote as an old Steve Jobs chestnut. You know, when we all hate Apple.