Technologists always get it wrong!

I was going over some old BBC training manuals recently and inside the front cover of one was a quote from the chief engineer of the Beeb from the mid-50's - In relation to VERA (the BBC's experimental video recorder that pre-dated 2" Quadraplex - loads of stuff online if you're interested) he said some thing along the lines of;

we'll never need more than three VTRs because even with the second network (what was to become BBC2) we'd only need one per network and a spare

How wrong can you be! Anyhow - he's in good company as a quick trip around famous quotes relating to predicating the future of technology indicates;

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.

Ken Olson, Digital Equipment Corporation (1977)

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

Thomas Watson, IBM (1943)

640k ought to be enough for anybody.

Bill Gates, Microsoft Corporation (1981)

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

Popular Mechanics (1949)

Why does it prove so hard to be realistic about the future? I think (in part) people find the implications of Moore's Law hard to believe - but it's been good for nearly half a century. In five years we will have the following;

• More than a terrabyte of storage in the PC you buy from PC World
  
• More than ten gigs of RAM in that PC
  
• A graphics card that can manipulate cinema resolution images in realtime
  
• 100BaseT internet connection at home
  
• An OS that crashes more often, requires ten times the resources of today and lets you word-process at roughly the level of efficiency as you could in the early nineties under Windows 3 on a '486!

How is it that the hardware guys give us so much more but the software boys don't do it better? What Mr Intel giveth Mr Microsoft taketh