{"id":258,"date":"2012-09-14T19:19:46","date_gmt":"2012-09-15T00:19:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/random-musings.org\/?p=258"},"modified":"2023-07-25T21:10:22","modified_gmt":"2023-07-26T02:10:22","slug":"he-never-said-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/random-musings.org\/index.php\/2012\/09\/14\/he-never-said-it\/","title":{"rendered":"He Never Said It"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">This is probably one of the least urgent matters that still manages to trouble me&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">There is a quotation attributed to Bill Gates that goes something like, &#8220;I can&#8217;t imagine why anyone would ever need more than 640 k of memory.&#8221;&nbsp; I don&#8217;t know where this quote originated.&nbsp; I do know that I first saw it in the late 1980&#8217;s, at a time when 640 k was about all most computers had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Even then the quote was obvious bullshit.&nbsp; No one involved with computers is satisfied with their speed or capacity.&nbsp; An end user, someone just using the computer for basics like e-mail, word processing, and other day-to-day tasks, might be content with whatever he&#8217;s got.&nbsp; Programmers and systems developers are never going to be satisfied.&nbsp; There is just no way that Bill Gates would have made such a statement except sarcastically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">What troubles me about this quote &#8211; and many, many others like it &#8211; is that it is so readily accepted without any sort of questioning.&nbsp; I think it&#8217;s probably related to how we so easily believe urban legends.&nbsp; There is something satisfying, something we just love to believe, about urban legends.&nbsp; They satisfy some sort of need (or at least a craving), so we accept them without much resistance.&nbsp; But they don&#8217;t help us to learn what is true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is probably one of the least urgent matters that still manages to trouble me&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","category-social-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/random-musings.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/random-musings.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/random-musings.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/random-musings.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/random-musings.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/random-musings.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":715,"href":"https:\/\/random-musings.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions\/715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/random-musings.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/random-musings.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/random-musings.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}