Today's Top Tech Stories • Leak plugged on high-def DVDs - • Pulling plug on Net service not easy - • Yahoo, SanDisk team on wireless MP3 player - • AOL will target Google search ads on its sites - • Teen accused of Web escort service - • Add USATODAY.com RSS feeds E-Mail Newsletters Sign up to receive our free Tech e-newsletter and get the latest tech news, Hot Sites & more in your inbox. E-mail: Select one: HTML Text

Tech titans wish we wouldn't quote them on this baloney Matthew Szulik, CEO of open-source software company Red Hat, wants to show me his company's new video. It rolls through evangelical sequences about how the underdog open-source movement is going to prove wrong its doubters. To bolster this point, the video flashes quotes by people through history who had experienced some sort of brain flatulence when assessing a technology newcomer. Among the quotes is this widely circulated comment attributed to Thomas Watson, builder of IBM, in 1943: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Except it's doubtful Watson ever said such a thing. I know this because I wrote a book about Watson. But it also got me thinking: There are about a half-dozen similar quotes that tech people use all the time. These quotes pop up in speeches, on posters, in PowerPoints, during sales talks and in pitches to raise money. They've practically become articles of faith in the industry. But how many of them are real? As it turns out, only one. Otherwise, they seem to come from the same sources who report Elvis sightings to the Weekly World News staff. Here are those tech quotes, in chronological order, and a look at their credibility: • "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication." — William Orton, president of Western Union, in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell tried to sell the company his invention. Well, Orton probably did say something like that, but probably not as a dismissal of the whole concept. First of all, it's reported in some sources that he said, "This electric toy has too many shortcomings ..." It was more of a way to disrespect Bell's version of the telephone and avoid licensing his patents — because within a year, Western Union had set up a separate company, American Speaking Telephone, to aggressively chase this new market. In fact, Western Union's handset, based on research by Thomas Edison, actually worked better than Bell's, according to The Worldwide History of Telecommunications by Anton Huurdeman. The problem was that voice calls couldn't travel very well on Western Union's telegraph lines. And then upstart Bell Co. sued the pants off Western Union for patent infringement. By 1879, Western Union was forced to sign an agreement that surrendered the phone business to Bell. Orton didn't underestimate the phone — he underestimated Bell. • "Everything that can be invented has been invented." — Charles Duell, U.S. Patent Commissioner, 1899. Total malarkey. This quote has been researched by various organizations as long ago as 1940, and no one has found evidence Duell said such a patently (nyuk-nyuk!) stupid thing. By contrast, he told Congress in 1899 — the same year he supposedly gave up on invention — that America's future success depended on invention. • "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" — Harry Warner, Warner Bros., as movies with sound made their debut in 1927. Context, people! Context! Here was Warner's full comment: "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? The music — that's the big plus about this." Warner Bros. was already investing in sound. Harry Warner believed that the sound that would sell movies was music, not prose. His mistake was artistic, not technological. • Watson's quote. IBM's archives staff has been asked repeatedly to find this quote. They can't. It's not in any of Watson's documented speeches, and this is a company that documented nearly everything Watson ever uttered. In my research for the book, I never found a reference to such a comment in any of Watson's papers or any story in the press. It's true that Watson at the time thought electronic computers would be sold only to research labs, but he was hoping to sell them to a lot of research labs — certainly more than five. Watson never doubted the power of electronics. But he, and just about everyone else at the time, failed to comprehend why any business would need to do thousands of calculations per second, particularly if it required an expensive, room-size, power-guzzling machine that would break down constantly — which was the state of computer art in 1943. (Note: Today's high-end PCs can process around 2.5 billion operations per second.) • "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." — Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment, in 1977. At last! A fairly real quote! I asked Gordon Bell, the legendary computer designer who worked at Olsen's side in those years, who confirmed that Olsen said those words. "It may have been to focus the company away from PCs when people around him were saying that we've got to work on small computers," Bell says. Bell also sent me a remarkable Digital interoffice memo from 1969, in which Bell and other staffers laid out the potential for a small home computer — including applications like "shopping in the home," "play complex games" and "income tax figuring." So it's not that Olsen didn't know about PCs. He just didn't seem to like them. "No matter what, he could not envision one in HIS home," Bell says. • "640K ought to be enough for anybody." — Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, 1981. Over and over, Gates has denied saying this, and no evidence seems to exist that he did. Besides, it makes no sense that he'd ever propose such a thing. Microsoft has always been in the business of pushing sales of new and better PCs: A new PC sold means new copies of Microsoft's software sold. So Gates implying that your current PC ought to be good enough would be like the Pope implying there were already enough Catholics. The tech industry had better look for some new quotes for those corporate videos and PowerPoints. Contributing: E-mail: kmaney@usatoday.com