Comment by tabtab

Perhaps the most damning quote: "I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't..." -Bill Gates

While he didn't use the exact words of the title quote, there are multiple sources which indicate he was indeed surprised at how fast applications grew in memory requirements/usage. Thus, I rate it as "partly true".

At lot of it was probably caused by the switch from hand-crafted low-level code to libraries and compilers, which usually take up more RAM for comparable features. While such tools sometimes can produce compact code, it's often not considered economical by publishers.