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Misattributed to Bill Gates
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
It is the standard joke about shortsighted tech forecasts, quoted every time a phone ships with a thousand times more memory than that. Gates never said it, but the line stuck because 640K really was a notorious DOS-era limit that programmers fought for a decade, so the legend feels true. Misquote-checkers love it, and so do people building an argument that planning for a fixed need is a mistake.
Context reviewed
In context
May contain spoilersShow the scene
There is no known record of Bill Gates saying this, and he has denied it. The 1981 date comes from the launch of the IBM PC, whose design set 640 kilobytes as the ceiling for ordinary memory under DOS. The earliest attribution found is a 1985 InfoWorld editorial that quotes Gates saying only that the team thought nobody would need that much. The punchier "enough for anybody" wording first appears in quotation marks in an InfoWorld timeline in January 1990. In a 1996 syndicated column Gates wrote that he had said some stupid things, but not that, and that no one in computing would claim a fixed amount of memory is enough for all time.
Sources (1)
- Quote Investigator: 640K ought to be enoughReply from Quote Investigator and citations listReference checked
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