Urban legend: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers

Out of the 20 potential customers they pitched to.

So they were counting on a 25% success rate and got 90%.

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.

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.

> 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)

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.

On the other hand, sometimes se non è vero, è 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Any good books or sources on this? I would be interested to read more

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.

See: intel / iphone

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.