There’s an ironic saying in journalism: “That’s too good to fact check.” Some stories are so funny—and so useful when you’re trying to make a point—that people repeat them constantly. Over time these stories are widely believed, at which point you can call them myths.
I’ve written more than a few myth-busting articles for Popular Science, and many of the myths are centuries old. But computers haven’t been around for long, depending on how you define the word “computer”. A lot of the people who defined the history of computing are still around, so you’d think our information about the field would be unclouded.
Yeah, about that. Here are a few commonly believed myths about the history of computers.
A moth wasn’t the first bug
There’s possibly nothing that better represents “too good to fact check” than the supposed origin of the term “computer bug.” The popular story dates back to 1947, when engineers at Harvard found a moth inside the Mark II computer. Someone at the lab taped the moth into a notebook and captioned it with the line “First actual case of bug being found.”
The First Computer Bug Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University. Image: Courtesy of the Naval Surface Warfare Center
It’s funny, right? That’s because it’s a joke. The term “bug” referred to problems that needed troubleshooting well before 1947—according to an article on JSTOR Daily, Thomas Edison used the term as early as 1878. Whoever wrote this line in the notebook was making a pun, while also pointing to how difficult it usually is to find the actual cause of a problem. It’s the “first actual case of bug being found.” This is the exact kind of joke you might find in code comments today, which makes it a great little historical tidbit in the history of computing culture.
But the idea that this is the origin of the word “bug” has proven irresistible, and it’s repeated often. Part of this might be because the legendary computer scientist and Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper worked in the lab. One popular version of the story is that she coined the term. There’s no proof that this was her notebook, and the Smithsonian says it probably wasn’t. None of this means that it isn’t a fascinating bit of history, though—it’s just not where the term “bug” comes from.
Y2K wasn’t overblown
Sometimes a problem’s solution works so well that people stop believing a problem existed in the first place. This is at least part of what happened with the famous Y2K bug. Popular culture, and some news reporting, made it sound like the world might end. It didn’t, obviously, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a problem.
The bug itself was simple to understand. Computers, in the early days, didn’t have a lot of storage space, to the point where even a couple characters of text were worth shaving off to free up storage. For this reason, many systems only used two digits to record the year. But the year 2000 was the first century change of the digital age, meaning a lot of systems would end up thinking the year was suddenly 1900.
Tests really did show this would cause problems, and the United States alone spent around $100 billion to solve the problem according to a Senate committee report. And while it’s true that no other country spent that amount, every country benefited from the bugs that were fixed. “In addition to the unprecedented level of effort undertaken by most organizations, the sharing of information, focus on supplier interrelationships, and attention to contingency planning all contributed to a smooth transition,” the report states.
And even with that effort, there were problems. A 2017 retrospective by Professor Martyn Thomas of Gresham College lists a number of issues that occurred even after all of that effort. For example, 15 nuclear reactors shut down (all of them started back up). Some of these issues were silly—someone in New York State got a $91,250 video store rental fee because their movie was supposedly 100 years overdue.
Such stories are rare, but that wasn’t inevitable. Countless potential problems were solved ahead of time. Y2K is an example of humanity recognizing a problem and spending resources to solve it. But sometimes solving a problem makes it seem like the problem never existed in the first place.
Bill Gates never said 640K was enough memory
There’s a common quote attributed to Bill Gates: “640K ought to be enough for anybody.” The quote supposedly refers to RAM, and it’s implied that Gates at some point thought no one would even need more memory than that. The legend is that he said this at some sort of computing conference back in 1981. Many systems, at the time, were limited to 640K of memory.
This supposed quote is brought up a lot, because 640 kilobytes is comically low by contemporary standards. A megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes; a gigabyte is 1,024 megabytes. Most modern computers ship with at least 8GB of memory, meaning 640K is unfathomable by modern norms. And that was predictable. Basically, if Bill Gates said this, it would be one of the dumbest things anyone ever said. The problem: There’s no clear evidence that he ever said it.
Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates in 1983. Image: Doug Wilson/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images Doug Wilson
Wired’s Jon Katz debunked the quote back in 1997, mostly to make the comedic point that Gates has never said anything memorable. In 2008 Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, told the New York Times that he suspects the quote is apocryphal. The obsessive volunteers at Wikiquote can’t find a source for the quote. I couldn’t find any original source for this quote either.
Gates, for what it’s worth, denied saying this way back in 1996: “I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that,” he wrote in a syndicated newspaper column. “No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.”
Except for me. 16GB ought to be enough for anyone. You can quote that: Justin Pot, 2026. I sincerely hope I am mocked for this, and soon, because as I’m writing this RAM prices keep going up and I’m wondering whether I’ll ever be able to afford more than 16GB.
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