Kewney: Is there anything to learn from history?

Guy Kewney introduces his new series of columns: a look back over the last twenty years of IT history

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history,” lamented George Bernard Shaw. Well, when it comes to IT, it would help if the history was accurately recorded in the first place, then we might glean something useful.

Take Bill Gates’ famous “640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anybody” statement. This infamous “gaffe” was in fact nothing of the sort. What he meant was that in a PC based on a chip that could address no more than a megabyte of RAM, the loss of 300-odd kilobytes to system address space wasn’t significant.

At that time, CP/M (eight-bit!) had already been given memory page extensions to six megabytes by a standards-based body, and the only reason PC DOS didn’t was because Gates quite reasonably expected to use 16bit and even 32bit chips when memory extension became an issue. I know this because at the time I knew Gates fairly well.

Having first-hand knowledge of the facts is an obvious advantage when it comes to trying to draw lessons from history. This is what I hope to do with this new column.

My own memory of the IT business goes back to the launch of the Intel 4004 microprocessor. Goodness knows, there’s an awful lot between then and now that I missed, but luckily I’ve got IT Week’s back issues to fall back on.