The following item appeared in
The Washington Post. I wrote it as a correction to a caption in a
previous edition. Mine is the third letter.
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You Don't Say . . .
Saturday, December 30, 2000;
Page A21
The last item in your Dec. 28
Business section feature "You Don't Say . . ." -- a
roundup of quotations about technology -- is correctly attributed
to Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corp. But it is
incorrectly dated as 1997. The correct date is 1977. Also, the
exact quotation (at least the one that is in wide circulation)
is: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in
their home."
-- Bill Ulman
One of the quotations in the
list of errant technology predictions unfortunately is a ringer:
No one ever said, "Everything that can be invented, has been
invented."
The quotation has been
attributed to various turn-of-the-century U.S. patent offices,
but all in error. As revealed in a decade-old article (Skeptical
Inquirer, Vol. 13, Spring 1989), the story of the skeptical
patent officer is an urban legend.
-- Paul Kedrosky
The caption under Bill Gates's
picture in your "You Don't Say . . ." feature is off
base. The 1981 quotation attributed to Gates -- "640K ought
to be enough for anybody" -- has nothing to do with Gates's
"early '80s conception of wealth," as your caption
suggests, but rather is about the amount of memory in a computer.
Gates made the comment because he was criticized for the design
of MS-DOS, which at that time did not have the ability to address
memory in excess of 640K.
Fortunately for both PC users
and for Gates's personal wealth, he was wrong, which is why we
now talk about millions rather than thousands when addressing
memory in personal computers.
-- Kenneth Bernstein
© 2000 The Washington Post
Company