640K Is Not Enough

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” and “No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer.” are two variants of a quote wrongly attributed to Bill Gates in 1981. This quote allegedly came about when DOS was designed with a conventional memory limit as ten times the amount of memory in the current personal computers of the day (64k). Gates has denied this quote and mentions that it is always provided without a source.

From an article in Science and Technology:

Q. Did you ever say, as has been widely circulated on the Internet, “640K [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody?”

No! That makes me so mad I can’t believe it! 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.