On 2014-10-11, 5:02 AM, Ed Vance -> Roger Nelson wrote:   
    EV> 10-10-14 15:24 Roger Nelson wrote to Daryl Stout about Windows shutdown   
      
    RN>> @MSGID: <54390901.13433.windowsa@capcity2.synchro.net>   
    RN>> @REPLY: <5438593D.13428.windowsa@capcity2.synchro.net>   
    RN>> On Mon May-21-1990 15:42, Daryl Stout (1:19/33) wrote to ROGER   
    RN>> NELSON:   
      
    DS>> Roger...   
      
    RN>> Didn't Bill Gates once say that was his biggest mistake?   
      
    DS>>   He did say that "640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody".   
      
    DS>>   Yeah, right.    
      
    EV> Howdy! Roger,   
      
    EV> Not too long ago I saw a article that said Bill Gates denied saying   
    EV> those words.   
      
   Whether BG said that or not, let's put it in context - at the time the IBM PC   
   was released - with 64kb RAM as the default, I believe, most personal   
   computers of the day had those sorts of limited memory... 64kb on the   
   Commodore 64 which was for a couple of decades the highest selling personal   
   computer model.   
      
   If anything, at the time the 640 kb limit would within a few years become a   
   problem, they would have been laughed at...   
      
   The Intel 8088 CPU used in the IBM PC could address a maximum of 1024 kb of   
   memory; IBM wanted to partition that memory space into 512 kb of   
   user-accessible memory and 512 kb that was limited to add-in cards (video RAM,   
   etc). Microsoft fought hard - and eventually won - to divide that into 640 kb   
   for user-accessible memory and 384 kb for system add-ins.   
      
   Note that when the IBM PC was released, customers could opt for several   
   different operating systems for it - Microsoft's DOS (called IBM PC DOS) was   
   only one of them, but the one that proved commercially successful - partly   
   because Lotus 1-2-3 was designed to run on it, and became the 'killer app'   
   that people wanted to run.   
      
   The next generation 80286 could access more RAM - but was hampered by the need   
   for backward compatibility; no one - not Microsoft, but also not IBM - had   
   forecast how successful that original IBM PC would be.   
      
      
    RN>> Yes, but I read somewhere last year in a tech article that he   
    RN>> admitted his biggest mistake was Ctrl-Alt-Del.  The article   
    RN>> didn't expand on what he meant, so I can only conclude that no   
    RN>> one was swift enough to ask the question.  I'll do some further   
    RN>> digging after I'm well into Windows 10, which has done some   
    RN>> strange things here.  (-:   
      
      
   I believe the context of that quote was around the use of Ctrl-Alt-Del for   
   logging onto Windows NT - not for rebooting a DOS session.   
      
   The requirement to press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in always seemed odd to me... why   
   have to press anything in order to get a log-in window?   
      
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