Bill Gates Bows Out06/24/2008 10:08:00 PMLocation : Cleveland, OH
In case you didn't know, next week, Bill Gates will stop working full-time at Microsoft. Of the many news reports, I want to single out two articles of interest. The first, from ComputerWorld, provides some Bill Gates quotes. And they explain that the "640K is all the memory you will need" legend:
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time," he [Bill Gates] told Bloomberg Business News in 1996. "I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again. 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."
CNet News published an interesting interview with Bill Gates, where he shares some insights into the early Microsoft days as well as some anecdotes concerning Lotus and IBM. Bill is asked a question about if there was a time where Microsoft came from behind. This is excerpted from his answer:
There's a lot of interesting twists and turns. There was actually a point where we talked with Lotus about getting together with them, but it wasn't a good cultural fit there. It was actually (Lotus CEO Jim) Manzi who--I mean, it wouldn't necessarily have happened--but it was Manzi who ended the discussions.
There was one day that was rather funny. IBM didn't invite us to the introduction of the PC. We'd been invited, and then they decided not to invite us. Well, we had been working night and day. I had told people, yeah, we had this invitation that said, yeah, we're going to go, there's going to be a big deal, and then they decided, nah, we don't want you to come to the thing. That was a little bit of a downer. Now, who cares, but...
Lotus as a Microsoft brand. Ponder that one.
Link: ComputerWorld: The quotable Bill Gates: In his own words
Link: CNet News: Ina Fried: Co-founder shares surprises, letdowns, morsels from early Microsoft days
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