Last week, Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the The Yale Book of Quotations, inaugurated Our Daily Bleg, with a request to learn the true source of the quote “Read my lips.”
A consensus has yet to be reached on the origin, but your thoughtful comments (to which Fred replied) made some headway — and possibly helped out Netflix.
Fred will keep blegging for quotes here on Thursdays. (You can send your own blegs to: bleg@freakonomics.com.) Here’s his next request:
Our Daily Bleg
by Fred R. Shapiro
There seems to be a strong correlation between interest in technology and interest in quotations, and many of the emblematic sayings of our time are computer sayings, such as “information wants to be free.”
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations ignores computer culture almost completely (in 1989 the editor said, “There ought to be something about computers and artificial intelligence. Surely somebody somewhere said something memorable.”). In my own book, The Yale Book of Quotations, I tried to pay special attention to computer-related quotes, and, in order to continue this effort in the next edition, I have begun a Computer Quotations Project seeking contributions of information about famous technological adages.
Recently I posted a list of inquiries about famous computer quotations on the Times‘s Bits blog. One of the quotes I asked about was “640K ought to be enough for anybody,” attributed to Bill Gates (the earliest I have found this credited to Gates was in 1990). There were over 100 comments posted, including one that, on its face, appears to be by Mr. Gates himself:
The statement I made about memory space was that we need about one new bit of addressable memory every two years or so. We did our best to get the 68,000 to be used in the IBM P.C. because that would have simplified the address space issues a lot.
The schedule was six months too late for IBM. The VAX already had a clean 32 bit address space. The history is far more complicated in terms of the x86 memory space because we supported both Extended and Enhanced memory (bank switching). At no time was the software the limiting factor — it was always the hardware going from 20 bits to 24 bits segmented (Os/2 and Windows exploited this) and finally 32 bits linear.
I have always found it amusing that that quote is attributed to me but you can read interviews I gave about address space from the 1970′s talking about the growing need for address bits over time. 64 bits is nice but even that will run out.
- Posted by billg
Are any readers of this blog able to verify with Microsoft or Mr. Gates himself whether this was an authentic posting by him? Also, can anyone discover any evidence of the “640K quote” prior to 1990?
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I’ll bet that the NY Times’s William Safire is to blame for crediting Dirty Harry with the phrase “read my lips.” Albeit unintentionally!
On Sep 4 1988, Safire published an article on the use of “read my lips” by GHW Bush:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE3D71F3AF937A3575AC0A96E948260
In this article he says “read my lips” is similar to “make my day,” a phrase used by Reagan. He doesn’t confuse the two phrases in the article, but he places them in very close context. I have a feeling that some people read this article incorrectly or remembered it wrong, thus giving rise to the erroneous Dirty Harry credit.
“Artificial Intelligence is neither.”
One of my professors in college told me that when I suggested I might want to work on AI for my Master’s. That pretty much ended that idea, particularly after I took a graduate level AI class and found out he was right.
#1 may well be correct. Although William Safire’s 1988 column about “read my lips” was quite well-researched and accurate, he may have unintentionally popularized a Dirty Harry connection for the phrase.
I *have* seen another Bill Gates denial of having said 640k should be enough for anyone. Here’s a Wired article from 1997 (albeit with a broken link):
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484
Or, just trawl Google for other pages that have the same denial:
http://www.google.com/search?q=“silly+quotation+attributed+to+me+that+says”
“64 bits is nice but even that will run out.”
Wrong prediction. Let’s do the maths : How much time would it take for a super-computer to access all of it ?
Imagine that I invent a processor with 1000 GHz (current processors don’t go above 5 GHz, 200 times slower), and which can write 1 KB with each cycle, making an incredible bandwidth of about 1 million GB/s. It would take about 5 hours, simply to set the whole memory (2^64 bytes).
How much place would we need ? Current chip technology is in the 30nm, so, imagine that I invent a memory cell which is only 1 square nm flat. 10^18 such cells on a flat chip would make exactly 1 square meter. I would need 16 m^2 to cover the 64-bit range. Even if I achieve to place these cells on 10,000 layers, I would need 4cm times 4cm. The 10,000 layers add one more dimension, but nevertheless let’s imagine it’s only 4cm deep too, making a cube.
Therefore the longest path from 1 end of the cube to the other and back would be a little less than 14cm. At the speed of light, it’s about 0.5 ns.
This means that the 1000 GHz processor is not better than a 2 GHz one when accessing this memory. If you want to do any serious work (other than simply writing values in a sequence), it takes much more than the previous 5 hours until you exhaust the whole : it is 500 times slower, therefore you need 5 time 500 = 2500 hours, or more than 100 days.
And all of this with the assumption that the processor is well enough superscaled to be able to make a complex operation on 1 KB of data at once. And hope you don’t have a BSOD during these 100 days.
Conclusion : 64-bit long addresses are a safe bet. 16 exabytes should really be enough for anybody.
@A programmer
If everything continues doubeling every two years, and I currently have 2^34 bytes of memory (not including video memory, which shares the same address space), then it should only take 60 years to need more then 64bits of addressable memory. Perhaps you think we’ll address 64 bit blocks instead of 8 bit chunks? well that would only give us 6 additional years, and high end servers today come with the amount of memory I’ll have in 6 years, so it doesn’t really buy us those six years (assuming things stay at the same page) :/
@A programmer
You’re making the assumption that the architecture of systems will remain unchanged – for instance, that we’re talking about a single processor architecture. Making assumptions like that will lead to similar assertions such as the one we’re discussing.
Instead, think about the kinds of problems that would require an address space larger than 16 exabytes of storage, and the rate at which demand is increasing for solution to these problems.
If it was Bill Gates making that statement, that’s what he’s thinking about.
@ A Programmer
Come on, dude. If there’s anything we’ve learned, its that predictions about the future that underestimate the limits of human ingenuity are never something to put money on.
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