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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36242 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Leopold Ashenbrenner has made some insane predictions for future power needs.

"I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them." - Professor Frink, The Simpsons

These kinds of false predictions do happen, of course, but counterpoint: people have been talking about fusion power generation and moon/Mars bases for over 70 years now, and neither of those two exists. Just because some people predicted the course of computing wrong does not mean that all optimistic predictions are valid.

IIRC an IBM executive is quoted (in the 1940s) claiming there might be a world market for "maybe five" computers. That actually happened and is what the quote seems to be referencing. Or Gates on "640K" being sufficient. IMO it's one of those "sold a faster horse" moments where someone needed to think bigger about broader applications if prices came down.

It didn't actually happen, or at least no one's been able to track it down. IBM (which is presumably biased) thinks it was based on a misintepretation of remarks Thomas J. Watson, Jr made at a 1953 stockholders meeting.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090207104556/http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/documents/pdf/faq.pdf

Gates probably didn't make the 640K remark either, though he may have said something similar. Early editions of Inside Macintosh, though, did say that all Macs would always have the same memory and storage configuration (which wasn't even the same as the first released one, since it claimed it would have one 880K floppy drive with the option for one more, and in fact, the Mac came out with a 400K floppy drive).

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