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.
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.
Take actual IBM quote in context. Not only was the 701 a tube based machine, memory was a huge problem at the time, and computers were still being designed for business or scientific applications. The 701 was a scientific machine. It's use was pretty much limited to univiersities and military applications. It doesn't much matter wheter the number was 5 or 18 or 500, the potential market was limited. On the other hand, I doubt that IBM held similar views on machines targetted at the business market. Given how early in the history of programmable digital computers this was, it wasn't entirely clear the situation would change. That took the development of integrated circuits for both logic and memory. (The transistor may have been a prerequisite for the development of ICs, but they were insufficient for the development of computers that were accessible to anyone outside of major institutions. They were simply too expensive to reliably manufacture at scale.)
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.
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.
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.
1. Take some conditional and true statement: “The original IBM PC can address 1024KB memory of which 640KB are in user space.”
2. Remove all conditionalities: “The PC has 640KB RAM as that’s all one needs.”
3. Attribute it to a famous figure: “Bill Gates said that 640K is all anyone ought to need.”
So somebody, somewhere, decided that 640k was "good enough" vs 700k or whatever.
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.
(The original Mac hardware is in many ways a masterpiece if you like tricks like this.)
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.
this is one link for it, there are others:
https://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/yarns/836...