i've never seen that, but even if he said it, that quote is not even in the same ballpark.
the 8088 had a one megabyte address space, more or less. when the original architects were deciding how to allocate that space to ram, rom, peripherals, etc, it made sense to talk about where to put the dividing line, to say how much of it goes to ram. that's a small-scale technical-decision-type quote, whereas the one that gets repeated over and over and over and over again, erroneously, seems designed to show that gates was dangerously short-sighted about the future of computing.
gates has a lot of faults, but that's not one of them.
Maybe you’re reading too much into it? I think he was honestly amazed by a 10x jump, and we hadn’t learned yet that programs will naturally expand to fill all the resources available.
the 8088 had a one megabyte address space, more or less. when the original architects were deciding how to allocate that space to ram, rom, peripherals, etc, it made sense to talk about where to put the dividing line, to say how much of it goes to ram. that's a small-scale technical-decision-type quote, whereas the one that gets repeated over and over and over and over again, erroneously, seems designed to show that gates was dangerously short-sighted about the future of computing.
gates has a lot of faults, but that's not one of them.