"You'll never need more than 64K of memory" -- Allegedly, Bill Gates circa 1985 in an interview.

I say allegedly because after searching Google I couldn't actually find the quote cited. I didn't try all that hard admittedly, but according to folklore "The Bill" said that and later ammended that to say "You'll never need more than 640K".

Here I sit with a laptop with 1Gb of memory and quite frequently when I've started Apache, Tomcat, Postgres and a couple of my development tools I notice my disk spinning like crazy, check vmstat and sure enough I'm in swap hell.

The more things change... the more they stay the same.

UPDATE:

It vexed me terribly that I couldn't find the quote. So I checked a few more places and discovered what I'd suspected for a while. Apparently the quote is a misattributed quote. On wikiquote I find a page about Bill Gates and under the section called appropriately enough "Misattributions" I find the following quote: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."

Still... I remember the day when we thought upgrading from 8K of RAM to 16K of RAM was something really really super.

There it is... you learn something every day...