What are my worst computer predictions?

I get asked occasionally by people what the future of computers and technology is and I have some ideas, but the truth is that it is going to be bigger and different in 5-10 years than anything we can guess.

The other question is what are the worst predictions you have ever made about computers? There are two that stand out in my mind.

First is when hard drives originally appeared in the early 1980s for personal computers (the first one I used was a 5megabyte hard drive on a Apple III), I commented a number of times as these new five and 10 megabyte (yes megabyte in one or two digit size) appeared, “What would anyone ever do to fill one up?”

Now to be realistic to today, we were living in a command line and text information world (no graphics or video) and that does not take up much space. I think back on it and laugh each time as I take a picture and realize a single picture would not fit on a drive then. Those drives also cost $500-1000.

The second bad prediction was in about 1994 or 1995 as the Internet and World Wide Web was appearing and spreading. I was in the movement and started writing web pages at this point. My prediction was that towns of 10,000 people or so (size of LaFayette or Swainsboro) would probably have somewhere around 100 people with Internet connections at home.

I thought it would just be the geeky of the geek and a few educators and a couple high income. It was still expensive to connect and we were connecting on 300 bps modems (high speed dialup was still to appear a couple years later at 56 thousand bps) and now we are in the billions bps.

As we got faster and hard drives grew (see prediction 1) web pages became more usable and connection costs came down and now if we went in those towns I suspect it is the opposite of my prediction, probably 100 people don’t have Internet at most.

Send your questions to Dwight Watt at dwight@ dwightwatt.com. His website is dwightwatt.com.