Found a 1987 article saying computers would never need more than 640KB of memory

I was digging through old tech magazines at a thrift store last weekend and found a 1987 PC World article. The writer claimed 640KB of RAM would be enough for any home computer forever. He said nobody would ever need more than that for spreadsheets or word processing. Now my phone has 8GB of RAM just to run a weather app. It made me laugh thinking about how wrong that prediction was. Anyone else found old articles that got the future hilariously wrong?

2 comments

2 Comments

wade5582h ago

Why does everyone assume the old writers were idiots for not seeing the future? Think about the context in 1987. Back then, programs were small and efficient because memory was expensive. A whole operating system fit on a floppy disk. People weren't making 4K video or running 50 browser tabs. The article was probably talking about basic home use, not professional servers or video editing rigs. If you were just typing letters and making simple spreadsheets, 640KB was actually a lot for that time. It's easy to laugh now, but they were making predictions based on the technology and needs of their era, not ours.

troy9961h ago

Hang on though, I gotta push back on that a little bit. Even with the context of 1987, 640KB was still a weirdly low ceiling to pick. By that point, people were already messing around with early graphics programs and sound cards that could eat up that memory real quick. You're telling me they couldn't imagine someone wanting to run a word processor and a basic paint program at the same time? That's not some crazy futuristic leap, that's just Tuesday for a hobbyist. Plus, the whole "nobody needs more than X" quote has been famously wrong basically every single time someone has said it, from hard drive sizes to phone storage. It felt less like a practical prediction and more like a stubborn lack of imagination, even for back then. Your mileage may vary, but to me it's less about judging them harshly and more about noticing a pattern of people being bad at guessing what comes next.