[HN Gopher] Urban legend: I think there is a world market for ma...
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Urban legend: I think there is a world market for maybe five
computers
Author : bschne
Score : 80 points
Date : 2025-01-22 12:12 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (geekhistory.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (geekhistory.com)
| amelius wrote:
| "is", not "will only ever be"
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| The worldwide part is also made up. He wasn't talking about the
| entire world market, just the companies they tried to sell to
| on one specific marketing campaign.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Leading contender for actual quote: "... we
| expected to get orders for five [IBM 701] machines, we came home
| with orders for 18."
| hinkley wrote:
| Out of the 20 potential customers they pitched to.
|
| So they were counting on a 25% success rate and got 90%.
| thmsths wrote:
| I wonder if it caused any issues. Getting 3 times the amount
| of orders can be great, but it can also be pyrrhic victory,
| depending on your ability to deliver.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| With this order size there is no public pricing
| information. So if you can't deliver fast enough you would
| adjust prices or specifically charge more for the first few
| delivery slots.
|
| Compare it to ordering very high price items with long lead
| time like airliners, you pay for a specific delivery slot,
| not just the item at a random moment. And you can buy
| options to more deliveries in a specific timeframe, which
| influences the price of your order.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| At the time (if TFA is correct) the 701 had already existed
| for a year. So it was only a question of building more of
| them, not that they had sold 5 vs 18 of something that
| didn't exist yet. But, they were also most likely on the
| hook for installing and running them -- at that time a
| computer like that would have been leased with installation
| services and on-site operations staff included.
| moralestapia wrote:
| No, it did not cause any issues.
| bityard wrote:
| From a salescritter's perspective, that is frankly not
| their problem.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I haven't thought about this much before, but I think it must be
| a myth. Going from the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM wiki on the history
| of Wikipedia, there were "Computing machines" in the 30s
| referring to their calculators and tabulating machines. IBM was
| already selling more than 5 of these devices, so if the 1943 date
| was true, it makes no sense. So it referring to a single machine
| having a market of 5 devices, that might be true.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Yeah, there were so many specialist analog computing machines
| out there in the 1940s and earlier that the pop culture
| interpretation of the quote as being "for all digital computers
| of all types the world over" just doesn't pass the sniff test.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| People really love apocryphal quotes that portray famous or
| disliked figures as morons. Bill Gates never said "640k ought to
| be enough for anybody" either, yet that circulates to this day.
| ciberado wrote:
| On the other hand, sometimes se non e vero, e ben trovato. We
| need stories. Models. The Gandhi we know was not the real one,
| same for Churchill or any other person, and the same thing
| happens with some villains. My personal point of view is that
| apocryphal quotes are just an extension of that mechanism, and
| can be useful in the construction of our thoughts.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Sure, but the formula is so clunky. Just take:
|
| A) a person famous for their brilliance or other quality
|
| B) a humdrum everyday failing experienced by regular people,
| such as hubris, poor ability to predict the future, problems
| in school, difficulty in relationships, etc.
|
| Mix them together and you get "Einstein flunked math in
| primary school" and Freud saying "who knows what women want"
| and other stuff.
|
| I'm all for stories, but these aren't very good ones.
| bitwize wrote:
| Today, 4 GiB, which was enough to run an entire university back
| in the 90s, is what the most rinky-dink Wal-Mart special
| laptops come with and Windows barely runs at all on that much.
|
| If Bill Gates _had_ said "640k ought to be enough for
| everybody", _at the time_ he could hardly be blamed for doing
| so, as single-user desktop machines of the day still typically
| shipped with 1 /10 or 1/5 that much.
| bombcar wrote:
| Even if Gates never said it, someone involved in the design of
| DOS decided that 640k would be the demarcation between normal
| memory and "reserved".
|
| So somebody, somewhere, decided that 640k was "good enough" vs
| 700k or whatever.
| layer8 wrote:
| It was decided by IBM for the IBM PC. The 8088 CPU had 1 MB
| of addressable memory, and some of it had to be reserved for
| the BIOS ROM, video hardware, and other expansion cards. So
| the exact limit was a trade-off between application RAM and
| hardware expansions. You could also phrase it as "384 KB is
| enough for BIOS and expansion cards".
|
| Moreover, 640K is kind of a natural division point in
| hexadecimal notation. Address segments in the 8088 memory
| model were 64K, hence segments 00000-90000 were for RAM, and
| segments A0000-F0000 were for ROM and hardware.
| ghaff wrote:
| There were so many gymnastics to get a bit more memory to
| work with. Multiple autoexec.bat and config.sys files for
| many games and the like.
| netRebel wrote:
| Exactly that got me into my current career. I, too,
| juggled drivers as a kid to get Wing Commander/Doom etc.
| to actually start.
| bitwize wrote:
| More like someone at IBM. The memory map mapped BIOS, video,
| and PCjr cartridge memory into the upper memory area. Other
| contemporaneous, non-IBM-compatible x86 systems of the era
| could relax this restriction. The Tandy 2000 loaded its BIOS
| from disk (instead of having it in ROM) and ran MS-DOS
| (indeed, its BIOS API was IBM-compatible even though hardware
| wise it was not), and could access up to 768K of user memory
| flat out (896K with aftermarket expansions). This briefly
| gave it an advantage handling large spreadsheets and the
| like.
| wrs wrote:
| This happens all the time. Early MacOS put flags in the upper
| byte of heap pointers, because somebody thought "16MB is
| enough for anybody". Physical address extensions had to be
| added to 32-bit Intel because 4GB turned out to not be
| "enough for anybody". Now "64-bit" processors today have
| 48-bit physical address spaces (or less), but we'll see...
| mywittyname wrote:
| And they never pass the smell test.
|
| Clearly the Chairman of IBM in the 50s doesn't believe they
| will only ever sell 5 computers. What would be the point in
| investing all of those resources into building anything with
| that sort of limit?
|
| It's obvious to anyone who understands business and takes a few
| seconds to consider the quote that he's likely talking about a
| specific product that is currently priced out of the market.
| The 5 in that statement is probably sourced from looking at
| their current clients and seeing A) who could afford such a
| machine and B) for which of those clients does buying the 701
| make clear economic sense? The 20 companies they pitched to
| probably fell into category A, but they just miscalculated how
| many of those fell into category B.
|
| The goal was to drive down costs through economies of scale.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Having a single person to identify with an idea via a quote or
| famous formula is a very human kind of shorthand we love.
| People still say "Edison invented the light bulb", even though
| we know that's not strictly true at all.
|
| People love revisionism in general. Equally we like it when
| doubt is cast on revered icons to take them down a peg. Or when
| grand villains and "found to be not as wicked as we once
| thought". We love treasured theories being overturned. We live
| in an age on the last frontier of truth, where any
| controversial claim that throws mud on a cherished belief is
| popular, just for it's iconoclasm.
|
| Meanwhile I think smart people say "I don't care if it's
| actually true or not." Did Jesus or Plato or Cicero or
| Machiavelli _actually_ say that? Who cares? It doesn 't matter.
| If it's a good story that makes a clear point or illustrates an
| idea, then it's useful. So long as it's not something deeply
| offensive or unfair to attribute, whether Watson actually said
| it is irrelevant. It speaks to a more abstract truth about
| scale and underestimates. It's the kind of fallible thing he
| would have said... might have said.... maybe should have said!
| As a famous businessman Watson would no doubt be proud to own
| that and have it associated with his name, even if slightly
| erroneously.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| A lot of Einstein quotes are either misquoted and/or not by
| him. Same for Churchill.
|
| Even the current news likes to pick quotes out of context.
| Trump says a lot of dumb things but often when I hear the full
| context of something people are mad about, he didn't say that.
| I am sure the right wingers do the same.
| schoen wrote:
| See also https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/ ("I Can't Believe It's
| Not Buddha!"). A huge genre!
| fuzztester wrote:
| the quote about Einstein, relativity and his driver is very
| cool.
|
| this is one link for it, there are others:
|
| https://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/yarns/836.
| ..
| hatthew wrote:
| As Abraham Lincoln once said, "Don't believe everything you
| read on the internet."
| bitwize wrote:
| As I understand it... one of the reasons why the Soviets fell
| behind in computer technology was because back in the 60s, while
| Soviet engineers had good designs that were state-of-the-art for
| the era, the communist economic planners estimated the
| requirements for computer manufacture to be one per university or
| government department for a total of maybe a few thousand, while
| Western manufacturers were getting orders into the tens or
| hundreds of thousands... and they had to come up with new
| technologies to produce the machines faster and cheaper in order
| to keep up, let alone compete with other manufacturers. So the
| market in the west grew explosively, requiring concomitant growth
| in innovation, and that put the Soviets on the back foot,
| requiring them to smuggle in and reverse engineer System/370s,
| PDPs, etc. in order to stay current.
| logicalfails wrote:
| Any good books or sources on this? I would be interested to
| read more
| bschne wrote:
| +1, wasn't aware of this, curious to learn more
| InvisibleUp wrote:
| It also didn't help matters that Stalin was greatly opposed to
| cybernetics, resulting in no research done on the topic until
| 1954, the year after he died. And even then, things didn't
| really kick off until 1958.
| vegabook wrote:
| See: intel / iphone
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I can't imagine _any_ salesperson making a statement like that!
| bluGill wrote:
| Sometimes they will - when they are predicting who might buy
| and thus how much they need to make to hit their numbers. No
| salesman want to have unmeetable sales goals.
|
| still rare though.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| It may be apocryphal, but it's not all that wrong.
|
| Those "about five" computers even have names: AWS, Azure, GCP,
| ...
| ghaff wrote:
| Sun's CTO repurposed the quote to make exactly that point in
| the 2000s, likely before any of those existed. It's very much
| an oversimplification but if you squint it's not totally wrong
| either.
| lysace wrote:
| Sounds like something Jonathan Schwartz (the ponytailed COO @
| Sun at the time, I believe) could have said, did you mean
| him?
|
| His blog was strangely addictive at the time. Great writer.
| ghaff wrote:
| No, I'm sure it was Greg though I don't think you can get
| to the Sun blogs any longer. But that's not to say that
| Jonathan didn't reuse the line himself. (I was an IT
| industry analyst at the time--and am again.)
|
| Ah, but here's a reference to it:
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/the-world-needs-
| only...
|
| I'm guessing it was when Sun started talking up Sun Grid
| though that part I'm not sure of but the timeframe of
| Stephen's article pretty much matches.
| lysace wrote:
| Ah!
|
| Oh, Stephen Shankland. He did a number of high quality
| reviews of this software product I was the tech lead on;
| about 10-15 years ago.
|
| High quality software reviews were rare already back
| then.
| ghaff wrote:
| I know Stephen very well. He's a good guy. He's leading
| content for Commonwealth Fusion Systems these days.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's a name I've not heard for a while.
|
| Apparently left CNET last year:
|
| <https://talkingbiznews.com/media-news/shankland-departs-
| cnet...>
| tw04 wrote:
| I believe his was actually: the network is the computer.
|
| And he was right, he just didn't anticipate greedy US ISPs
| would set progress back 2 decades.
| ghaff wrote:
| Oh, please. Pray tell, inform us about how ISPs held back
| progress for 2 decades. Good broadband access could perhaps
| have come earlier and cheaper but it basically came soon
| enough once web-based services were available. I'm not
| going to argue that US ISPs are universally great but
| saying that they held back progress by "2 decades" is
| pretty much ignorant. Especially given that Sun was
| presumably mostly talking about the context of business
| computing at the time.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 1994: a UWashington CS PhD student quits their PhD and
| goes to help @home (IP-over-cable) get started, on the
| basis that they would provide symmetric up/down bandwidth
| at full capacity.
|
| How long was it until this became a reality?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You _could_ go back a couple of decades earlier (1960s--
| 1980s) and point at AT &T who specifically prohibited
| third-party devices on their network (answering machines
| and even neck-rests or phone-book covers were among the
| prohibited items),[1] and had flatly rejected packet-
| switched routing as an obvious threat to their
| monopoly.[2]
|
| Unix itself (and Linux, Android, and MacOS) wouldn't have
| existed save for a 1954 consent decree which prohibited
| AT&T from entering the software business.[3] When the
| company found itself with an accidental operating system
| the only thing they _could_ do was give it away for free.
| "From Ken with love".[4]
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. Partially supported here:
| <https://www.promarket.org/2023/02/20/when-considering-
| breaki...>. Phone book covers was AT&T v. Winback &
| Conserve Program, Inc. Hush-a-Phone was an earlier case
| in 1956 involving a cup-like device, physical only, with
| no electrical or electronic components:
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-
| Phone_Corp._v._United_S...>.
|
| 2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars#Early_com
| puter_n...>
|
| 3. <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-
| we-thank-...>
| <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20190086>
| and <https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/pol.2019
| 0086> (PDF)
|
| 4. <https://sanctum.geek.nz/presentations/a-brief-
| history-of-uni...>
| ghaff wrote:
| I _could_ go back into the history of the
| telecommunications monopoly in the US but that hardly
| seems relevant to the modern Internet.
| js98 wrote:
| This website is unreadable on mobile.
| thayne wrote:
| > Some people question how much of the internet is a place that
| documents history, and how much of the internet is a place that
| writes and recreates history.
|
| So, basically the same as things written before the internet
| existed. It's not like people didn't write down myths and legends
| on paper, or stone tablets for that matter.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > It's not like people didn't write down myths and legends on
| paper, or stone tablets for that matter.
|
| Across broad swathes of the planet (i.e. all of the Americas),
| they did not (until very very recently in the overall scheme of
| human history)
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| IBM confirmed they went into a sales cycle in 1953 expecting to
| sell five units of their first machine, the IBM 701 Electronic
| Data Processing Machine. We don't know precisely how or to whom
| this estimate of five units was conveyed beforehand, but the gist
| of the statement appears likely.
| metalman wrote:
| The way things are going this might be an over estimate, what
| with the possibility of a space based completely stable billion
| cubit QPU's, beaming all out data around with lasers, 3 might do
| it.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _" Don't believe everything you read on the Internet." -George
| Washington_
| PeterStuer wrote:
| A litle bit more cloud consolidation and you could argue we're
| nearly there.
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