Predictions -- Hindsight is 20/20

• "The end of the world will surely come in eighteen hundred and eighty one."- Mother Shipton, English prophet, c.1600.
• "The telephone may be appropriate for our American cousins, but not here, because we have an adequate supply of messenger boys." - group of British experts, c.1900.
• "Aircraft are interesting toys, but of no military value." - Marshal Foch, France, 1912.
• "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" - Associates of David Sarnoff, manager of an early US radio network, 1920s.
• "While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossiblity, a development on which we need waste little time dreaming." - Lee de Forest, "father of radio", 1926.
• "I think there is a world market for as many as 5 computers." - Thomas Watson, head of IBM,1943.
• Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons - Popular Mechanics, 1949.
• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 (who was wrong, even then, as the first Apple was already available. Maybe he had a very narrow idea of what people did at home.)
• The first cars were called horseless carriages, and the first radio was called a wireless. What else could be renamed whatlessly? Is an egg the headless chook?) And what might be the next thing to drop an association we now take for granted? The pageless book? The computerless internet?

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