Recent Predictions

     "Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons." - Popular Mechanics, 1949.

     Built when computers were an anomaly, when telecommuting was unheard of and well before the birth of the Word Wide Web, the Allen Teleport is a prescient concrete embodiment of what were, at the time, futuristic concepts. - David F. Donnelly, Ph.D.

     "We're fast approaching a time when computers will design themselves, with no help from us lowly jabbering primates... .... Computers will soon use their superior 'thinking material' to make themselves smarter. Humans and computers already design generations of computers together, but (Paul) Horn says, as time goes by, people will be phased out of the process.

     At that moment, our relationship to our world will change more profoundly than it has at anytime since Homo Sapiens made friends with fire. For eons, human beings have been far and away the most intelligent entities on earth. But this era is coming to an end. If you are a human and not a computer, you may be wondering : Is this good? No one has any idea. We are crossing a Rubicon -perhaps into paradise, perhaps into hell, definitely into a life our pitiful brains are incapable of anticipating.

     ....... Forget about movies on demand; we'll have experience on demand. Want to talk philosophy with Plato, match wits with W.C. Fields, play a game of Battleship against Lord Nelson? Entirely possible. - From "2001-3000 The world as it will be" in Life magazines Special Double Issue: The Millennium, Fall, 1997, pp. 168-9.

     Imagining the day when most personal computers are hooked up to cable systems the way TV sets are today, Microsoft is preparing to invest as much as $1 billion in the cable-TV division of U S West, the New York Times reported today (Tuesday). (From Studio Briefing, 11/5/97)

     "Some technologies just don't catch on. Some last for a while, then get ousted, while others are just plain junk. The computer industry, of course, has its share of dogs. CNET picks ten technologies guaranteed *not* to change the world. " See: http://www.cnet.com/Content/Features/Dlife/Failure/?dd

     "Too much computer power is coming too quickly to think that the keyboard is going to be the interface in five or ten years. " - John Markoff, p. 191. from Brockman, J. (1996). Digerati: Encounters with the cyber elite San Francisco: HardWired.

     "Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency" - Steve Jobs, 1996.

     Toshiba on the Digital Video Disk (DVD) player: "We're proud to have started a revolution that will help bring Hollywood and Silicon Valley together. But it's only just begun. Get ready for the ride of your life. Since the first silent celluloid hero rode a flickering beam of light through a darkened theater, the medium has been evolving to this." (From an advertisement appearing in the Wall Street Journal, September 16, 1996, p. R6.)

     "User profiling, computer's ability to know who you are and what your preferences are, will be out by 3rd quarter 1998" - Bill Machrone , 1996.

     The Electronics Industries Association predicts that PCTVs will penetrate the market faster than the VCR or compact disks. They are predicting that they will reach 17% of the consumer market over the next five years. (from Broadcasting & Cable, 10/28/96, p. 58)

     "The desktop market is going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade" - Steve Jobs , 1996.

     "Today, multimedia is a desktop or living room experience, because the apparatus is so clunky. Even laptops, with their clamshell design, do not lend themselves to being very personal information appliances. This will change dramatically with small, bright, thin, flexible high resolution displays. Multimedia will become more book-like, something with which you can curl up in bed and either have a conversation or be told a story." - Nicholas Negroponte, 1995 (from Being Digital, p. 71)

Past Predictions

     Many early computer scientists felt that only a handful of computers would serve the world's computing needs. This comment from British Physicist Douglas Hartree made in 1951 is fairly typical. "We have a computer here in Cambridge; there is one in Manchester and one at the (National Physical Laboratory). I suppose there ought to be one in Scotland, but that's about all."

In 1945, Vannevar Bush envisioned a means of information access that resembles the current means of linking information via hypertext. In 1964, Martin Greenberger used Bush's proposals to outline market possibilities for information services, electronic commerce and community. The Atlantic Monthly has reprinted both of these early visions of the info-age.

     A scant 100 or so persons throughout the world now use computerized conferencing on a regular basis. But the time may be fast approaching when far more people will be conferring through computers and we will begin to view computer conferencing as a "natural" way to interact. - An Altered State of Communication? June 1975, J. Vallee, Robert Johansen, and Kathleen Spangler.

     "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" -Ken Olson, president and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977. - VanDerBeek on the future of electronic media.