Quite likely. Many early x86 programming environments had limits around 64K due to segentation (e.g. early Turbo Pascal), so I'm not at all surprised that someone stuck with crappy old books and little access to information would think the machine had 64K RAM.

As an illustration to those that don't seem to understand, there was that year when I was a kid when my friends and I decided BASIC on the C64 was not good enough, and we tried to figure out how to get started with assembler....

Something that started with us trying to poke the character codes for BASIC statements into memory, unaware that we were not only still writing BASIC, but had "invented" a storage method substantially less efficient than what BASIC on the C64 already used (it was stored tokenized).. It took a long time before I managed to get hold of an assembler, and months more before I managed to get hold of a tutorial that got me anywhere.

This was with a group of 5-6 of us that all wanted to learn, but none of whom knew where to get the information, nor had parents that knew. My dad was programming, but only BASIC, and didn't know where to get what I wanted - few books were available, even fewer translated.

People really shouldn't underestimate how vital easy access to documentation is.

We're talking about a time when e.g. when I (years later) finally got hold of precise cycle counts for raster interrupts for the C64 (understanding precise cycle counts in the presence of sprites etc. was vital for many more advanced demo effects), it was a 3rd or 4th generation photocopy of a handwritten diagram that someone had partially learned from others, partially reverse engineered through countless hours of adjusting interrupts a cycle at a time to study the results.

None of the books I'd managed to get hold of contained even a fraction of the amount of detail.

arebop, why aren't you looking for the worst in people like the rest of us?

Frankly I remember playing with qbasic/basic and being put off by how unwieldy it all was. Kudos to any kid that makes anything in basic.

I didn't become interested in programming until I managed to get a copy of Modula-II off of a BBS.