Re:History of the IBM PC, part two: The DOS empire strikes
by jecel on Tuesday August 01, 2017 @01:39PM
(#14903276)
My impression is that the 640KB quote started as a huge simplification of the arguments Bill Gates made in an article in an early PC Magazine (might have been a rival magazine instead - it has been 35 years since I read it) defending IBM's decision to "waste" so much of the precious 1MB address space on I/O. And he was right: without this networking and betters graphics would have been much harder to do later on.
I read somewhere[1] that the quote is technically accurate but taken out of context, in that it did not mean that 640K were enough for everyone forever. And at the time the IBM PC was introduced, 640K were plenty of RAM for a single user.
(I think it was "Expert C Programming" by Peter van der Linden.)