Cynics Unlimited

The persistent danger with being a constant naysayer or skeptic is ending up with your foot in your mouth should the “unlikely” become reality. Nowhere is know-it-all nay saying more prevalent on the internet, where attention-starved debaters jockey for undefined accolades of intellectual supremacy. Of course, the Internet has a very long memory – hence those who make foolish predictions or criticism achieve their desired immortality under undesirable circumstances.

This is surely the cross to bear for Scott Nudds. In 1997, science student Kristian Thommesen posted a hypothesis on the increasing use of computer RAM to the newsgroup comp.os.ms-windows.misc:

May I ask why not? – if the trend of my personal computers continus,
ther’s a doubling af memory about each 2.5 years.
Now being 64MB – it
would take 4*2.5 years = 10 years before I hit the GB and in 15 years
I’ll hit the 32bit address-space limit.

128MB of memory in a home computer was considered luxurious in 1997 while 1GB (gigabyte, or 1024MB of RAM) was virtually unthinkable – if not due to physical machine capacity then certainly because it was cost-prohibitive to the average PC owner. Still, poor Mr Nudds went over the top in his condemnation –

Exponential growth is impossible to sustain for any appreciable
length of time as a practical matter. The fact that current growth is
exponential means that in short order we can expect it to abruptly halt.
But this is not the reason PC’s will never have gigabytes of RAM.

The reason is simple. Somewhere in the 50 to 200 megabyte range, all
applications, (or at least their active portion), will reside in memory.
Doubling memory may allow the entire set of applications to reside in
memory, but the performance gain will be small. The larger the memory
capacity, the smaller the gain.

Big words. The fourth generation successor to Windows 95 –Windows Vista- was released less than a month ago and exactly 10 years after the RAM discussion above was posted. Vista’s system requirements are telling:

• 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 GB of system memory
• 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space

So much for the halt of exponential growth. To add further injury, 1GB of RAM can be prohibitive even in Windows XP for users who edit video, compose music or play recent 3D games.

Perhaps Mr Nudds (and hopefully that’s not his real name) can take solace in the fact that he is not the first person to make damnable statements about technology. He’s in good company:

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
-Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM (1943)

“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.”
-Nameless Editor at Prentice Hall (1957)

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
-Ken Olson, Founder of Digital Equipment Corp (1977)

“The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse.’ There is no evidence that people want to use these things. What businessman knows about point sizes on typefaces or the value of variable point sizes? Who out there in the general marketplace even knows what a ‘font’ is? The whole concept and attitude towards icons and hieroglyphs is actually counterrevolutionary”
-John C Dvorak, Now Contributing Editor to PC Magazine (1984)

“Computer games don’t affect kids, I mean if Pac man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music.”
-Kristian Wilson, Nintendo (1989)