2000 For the period Dec 20, 1999 to Jan 10, 2000 we got fewer new viruses than in an average five-day period of 1999. (Vesselin Bontchev)

1999 It’s possible that we could see 200,000 viruses around Y2K. (Carey Nachenberg)

1999 We’re going to suffer a year of technological disruptions, followed by a decade of depression. (Ed Yourdon)

1998 Folks, the Mac platform is through – totally. (John Dvorak)

1998 Employers will attempt to fill 1.6 million new IT jobs in 2000. (ITAA)

1998 I predict that one fallout of year 2000 problems will be public insistence on regulating software developers. (Steve McConnell)

1998 There isn’t an Internet company in the world that’s going to fail because of mistakes — Internet companies make thousands of mistakes every week. (Candice Carpenter of iVillage)

1997 Microsoft has stretched itself so thin, within a couple of years it will experience serious reversals. We’ll make the millennium my deadline. (Bob Lewis in InfoWorld)

1997 The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision. (Lou Gerstner)

1997 The number of unfilled positions for IT employees at large and mid-size US companies is approximately 190,000 nationwide. (ITAA)

1996 I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. [see 1981] (Bill Gates)

1996 The network is the computer. (Scott McNealy)

1995 I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse. (Robert Metcalfe)

1995 To see tomorrow’s PC, look at today’s Macintosh. (BYTE Magazine)

1994 I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least ten years. (Bill Gates)

1994 The mainframe is dead. It’s time to give it a decent burial and move on. (Client/Server Today)

1993 I view the landslide of C use in education as something of a calamity. (Nicklaus Wirth)

1993 IBM? We dont even think about those guys anymore. Theyre not dead, but theyre irrelevant. (Larry Ellison)

1991 By the end of this decade, I foresee massive unemployment among the ranks of American programmers, systems analysts, and software engineers. (Ed Yourdon)

1991 Hello everybody out there using minix – I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. (Linus Torvalds)

1991 DOS Computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use wordwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form. (New York Times)

1991 I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15, 1996. (Stewart Alsop)

1991 The initial run of 40 processors for shuttle installation will cost only $1,000,000 apiece (not including development costs). It is hoped that once volume production is achieved, an additional 60 units for ground support will be produced at only $500,000 each. (Electrical Engineering Times)

1990 By 1995, desktop operating system shipments will be 50 per cent OS/2, 20 per cent Unix, 15 per cent Macintosh and 10 per cent PC-DOS. (Meta Group)

1990 From a practical viewpoint, it’s easy to see that C will always be with us, taking a place beside Fortran and Cobol as the right tool for certain jobs. (Larry O’Brien)

1990 In ten years, computers will just be bumps in cables. (Gordon Bell)

1989 Real concurrency — in which one program actually continues to function while you call up and use another — is more amazing but of small use to the average person. How many programs do you have that take more than a few seconds to perform any task? (New York Times)

1988 If users wanted a graphical interface, wouldn’t the Macintosh dominate the market? (Bruce Tonkin)

1988 Computer viruses are an urban myth. (Peter Norton)

1988 I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all times. (Bill Gates)

1987 Computer memory requirements are growing by 1 address bit per 18 months. (IBM)

1986 By the turn of this century, we will live in a paperless society. (Roger Smith of General Motors)

1986 UNIX is dead, but no one bothered to claim the body. (John Dvorak)

1986 As we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity. (Frederick P Brooks)

1985 At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats. (The Washington Post Magazine)

1984 The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a mouse. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. (John Dvorak)

1983 No one knows what to do with seven windows at one time. (PC Week Magazine)

1983 Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. (Richard Stallman)

1982 Time-sharing just doesn’t work. (Ken Thompson)

1982 I don’t know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran. (C A R Hoare)

1981 640K ought to be enough for anybody. [see 1996] (Bill Gates)

1979 So who knows? VisiCalc could someday be the software that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog. (Benjamin Rosen)

1977 There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home. (Ken Olson of Digital Equipment)

1972 The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected. (UNIX Programming Manual)

1971 QWERTYIOP [the first email message - or something like it] (Ray Tomlinson)

1970 In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. (Marvin Minsky)

1970 Most computers will probably still occupy a large room, however, because of the space needed for the ancillary software – the tapes and cards to be fed in, the operating staff, and the huge piles of paper for printing out the results. (Prof Desmond King-Hele)

1969 Some form of voice input-output will be in common use by 1978 at the latest. (G M Bernstein of the Naval Supply Command)

1968 What the hell is [a microprocessor] good for? (Robert Lloyd of IBM’s Advanced Computing Systems Division)

1965 [By 1985], machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do. (Herbert Simon)

1964 Barring unforeseen obstacles, an on-line interactive computer service, provided commercially by an information utility, may be as commonplace by 2000 AD as telephone service is today.(Martin Greenberger)

1962 The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. (Marshall McLuhan)

1962 Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition. (Dennis Gabor)

1962 Another type of backup storage uses a number of large, thin discs (about three feet in diameter), with magnetic coating on the surfaces. (Douglas Engelbart)

1962 [The IBM Stretch computer] is immensely ingenious, immensely complicated, and extremely effective but somehow at the same time crude, wasteful and inelegant; and one feels that there must be a better way of doing things. (Christopher Strachey)

1961 I have a feeling that if over the next ten years we train a third of our undergraduates at M.I.T. in programming, this will generate enough worthwhile languages for us to be able to stop, and that succeeding undergraduates will face the console with such a natural keyboard and such a natural language that there will be very little left, if anything, to the teaching of programming. (Peter Elias)

1960 Few things seem to lie so far beyond the ordinary human ken than computers. To most people the notion that computers can be understood and operated by anyone other than a scientific genius seems wildly improbable. (The Times)

1960 Business situations usually move slowly enough that there is time for briefings and conferences. It seems reasonable, therefore, for computer specialists to be the ones who interact directly with computers in business offices. (J C R Licklider)

1959 Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail. (Arthur Summerfield, US Postmaster General)

1959 The problem is to compress a room full of digital computation equipment into the size of a suitcase, then a shoe box, and finally small enough to hold in the palm of the hand. (Jack Staller)

1958 Today [software] is at least as important as the ‘hardware’ of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like. (John Wilder Tukey)

1957 I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year. (Editor of business books for Prentice Hall)

1954 Why would you want more than one machine language? (John von Neumann)

1953 If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. (Frank Lloyd Wright)

1952 The general application of the transistor in radio and television is far in the future. (Lee deForest)

1949 Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. (Popular Mechanics)

1949 As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent finding mistakes in my own programs. (Maurice Wilkes)

1949 It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years. (John von Neumann)

1948 Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. (“Emmanuel Goldstein” in 1984)

1947 1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found. (Harvard Mark II logbook)

1946 [Television] won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night. (Darryl F Zanuck)

1946 It may well be that the high-speed digital computer will have as great an influence on civilization as the advent of nuclear power. (Douglas Hartree)

1945 The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability and something is bound to come of it. (Vannevar Bush)

1943 I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. (?Thomas Watson of IBM)

1939 The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen: the average American family hasn’t time for it. (The New York Times)

1937 I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and the general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. (Alan Turing)

1937 There is no practical obstacle whatsoever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind. (H G Wells)

1936 I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate of 40,000, or even 4,000, per hour. Such a revolutionary change as the octonary scale should not be imposed upon mankind in general for the sake of a few individuals. (F H Wales)

1927 The modern computer hovers between the obsolescent and the nonexistent. (Sydney Brenner)

1927 Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? (H M Warner of Warner Brothers)

1922 I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our education system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. (Thomas Edison)

1920 It is now possible for a business man to talk with his office from a moving vehicle. The apparatus necessary to do this marvellous thing can be carried in a small dress suit case. (John Brady)

1912 The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks. (Albert Einstein)

1910 One of the places where the wireless telephone will be particularly valuable will be in mines. (Winston Farwell)

1905 It is a far cry from the monkish calligrapher, working in his cell in silence, to the brisk click, click of the modern writing machine, which in a quarter of a century has revolutionized and reformed business. (Scientific American)

1903 The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented by new discoveries is exceedingly remote. (Albert Michelson)

1899 Everything that can be invented, has been invented. (sarcastic remark by Charles Duell of the U.S. Office of Patents)

1896 The term ‘bug’ is used, to a limited extent, to designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric apparatus. (N Hawkin)

1895 [By the end of the 20th Century there will be a generation] to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen quire of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone [and] to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine. (Max Nordau)

1892 Any two friends living within the radius of sensibility of their [electrical ray] receiving instruments, having first decided on their special wave length and attuned their respective instruments to mutual receptivity, could thus communicate as long and as often as they pleased by timing the impulses to produce long and short intervals on the ordinary Morse code. (William Crookes)

1889 Mr Thomas Edison has been up on the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug’ in his phonograph. (Pall Mall Gazette)

1876 This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. (Western Union memo)

1865 Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value. (Boston Post)

1851 By means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time. The round globe is a vast brain, instinct with intelligence! (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

1842 The Analytical Engine is not merely adapted for tabulating the results of one particular function and of no other, but for developing and tabulating any function whatever. (Ada Lovelace)

1838 [It would not be long] ere the whole surface of this country would be channelled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land, making, in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country. (Samuel Morse)

1825 What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches? (Quarterly Review)

1819 Artificial lighting drives out fear of the dark, which keeps the weak from sinning. (Kölnische Zeitung)

1486 So many centuries after the Creation, it is unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value. (report to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain)

1483 He wept and was nothing content, but it booted not. (Dominic Mancini)

79 I am amazed, O Wall, that you have not collapsed and fallen, since you must bear the tedious stupidities of so many scrawlers. (graffiti in Pompeii)

10 Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments. (Julius Sextus Frontinus)

-360 The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls. You will give your disciples not truth but the semblance of truth: they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing. (“Phaedrus” by Plato)