640K ought to be enough for anybody. - Bill Gates, 1981

It’s the 25th anniversary of Bill’s most famous words. I guess that some of us don’t know what he was referring to. He meant 640 thousand bytes of random access memory(RAM) storage on a personal computer. The computer I’m writing this post with has 2 billion bytes of RAM. 3125 times as much memory.

That’s when most personal computers didn’t even have hard drives! They had 2 floppy disk drives, and the disks were really “floppy”. Today’s personal computers were far off science fiction only 25 years ago.

How could Bill Gates, a brilliant guy, have been so wrong? What science fiction will be true in another 25?

Read anything by Ken Wilber and you may get a hint to the answers to these questions.

One more quickie quote along the same line. Remember DEC? PDP-11(with those colorful paddle switches!) and VAX computers of the 70’s and 80’s? Now this is funny:

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. - President and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977