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TIL the 1943 IBM quote about 'five computers' might be fake and I can't decide if that ruins the fun or not
So I fell down a rabbit hole after seeing that Thomas Watson quote on a mug at a thrift shop in Cincinnati, the one about there being a world market for maybe five computers. Some folks say he never said it, or at least nobody can find it in any speech or memo from the time, and it only started showing up years later in books and articles. Others argue it doesn't matter because the spirit of it fits how a lot of old business guys really thought about machines back then. Here is why I care: half the fun of this community is laughing at how wrong these predictions turned out, but if we are passing around made up quotes, we are basically laughing at stuff nobody ever claimed. I spent like 3 hours on this and found that the same thing might be true for a couple other famous tech predictions too. So where do you all land on this, do we keep posting the quotes as long as they are funny, or should we be checking sources first? I honestly don't know which side I'm on yet.
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wren_smith448d ago
Read somewhere that a researcher spent years trying to find the original source and came up empty, which kind of tells you all you need to know. I still laugh at the quotes but now I check them first before sharing. The made up ones are honestly less funny once you know nobody actually said them.
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