Does anybody else remember when he said that there would probably never be a need for a 4.0 release?
Because I remember that. Or maybe I'm hallucinating.
Linus Torvalds has decided Linux 6.8 will in all likelihood debut next week. Last Sunday, Torvalds suggested the new cut of the kernel might need an extra week of work. "So this may end up being one of those releases that get an rc8," he suggested on February 25, adding "We'll see. The fact that we have a bit more commits …
The supposed "640K limit" was an IBM hardware limit, not an MS software limit. The IBM hardware spec was already firmly in place before Gates even heard about the project. Even if he had made the comment (which is extremely doubtful ... nobody has ever documented it), he would have just been agreeing with IBM's spec. And it wasn't really 640K, it was more like 704K, if you knew what you were doing. I find it absolutely amazing that this piece of incorrect trivia is still being parroted as fact after all these years ...
OTOH, I personally remember Steve Jobs saying that "128K ought to be more than enough for home users". It was at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in late 1983, as he was demonstrating the original Macintosh, just before the public unveiling. At the time, he had a point ... people were running flight simulators in 64K.
On the gripping hand, none of this matters any more. It's all just an accident of history.
Probably not a Watson quote. There is no evidence to suggest he ever said that.
However, Howard Aiken (the engineer who was in charge of building IBM's Harvard Mark I) once said Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country. ... It is thought that this is the origin of the Watson misquote.
"... is that “26 drive letters ought to be enough for anybody”."
I totally agree with Microsoft on this one. What kind of idiot would want even 10 drives on a Microsoft system? There are now (and always have been) far more robust ways of storing files than anything that Microsoft has ever built.
This has been true since I was placed in charge of half a dozen Pilot build IBM PCs running the DOS 0.96 Beta.
"Still, you would think that being able to have names of more than one character for your volumes would be helpful in remembering what’s on them."
Volume labels were allowed to be up to 11 characters going back to FAT12. (FAT8, if I remember correctly, was only 9 characters, but I only ran across that once or twice in the wild. so I might be misremembering.).
He just doesn't like small numbers >20, so the major number gets incremented for no reason other than that. Linux essentially hasn't had any "major" big bang versions since 2.6 really - it's just been a continuous, steady evolution since then, with the version number incrementing according to how Linus feels, rather than any connection to major features.