Darn. I probably should've realized that when I saw that the person who wrote that article also wrote Dealing With Nazism in the Workplace. Poe's Law strikes agian. But on the plus side, Poe's Law also awes me, so I still get some ammount of awe from this. Although it's not unlikely that at least a few people at the time had similar opinions for real.
edited 17th Jun '12 8:06:50 PM by cfive
I was alive — if young — when people started talking about having computers in every household, and about computers that are always connected to the news and to other computers and so on. And I remember saying, with all the wisdom of my eight years or so, that this was a stupid idea: I mean, who could possibly have any use for that?
edited 17th Jun '12 11:43:29 PM by Carciofus
But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.^ According to The Other Wiki, it's a misquote regularly attributed to Thomas Watson, from IBM.
Not that there isn't a shortage of exceedingly short-sighted or sufficiently unimaginative comments about the advance of technology, mind you, but that ain't one of them.
All your safe space are belong to TrumpWalt Disney's collaborative documentaries with Wernher von Braun had a rather amusing description of an orbiting space station, including an explanation of how the enormous outer rim of the spinning gravity generator will provide space for all the "calculating engines" required to keep the craft flying, with a diagram showing whole rooms full of rotating tape and coiled wires. They failed to anticipate miniaturized electronics.
<><Yeah, that's a pretty common failure, even with people you'd think of as being incredibly far from stupid like Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein.
All your safe space are belong to TrumpI think Plan Nine From Outer Space sums it up pretty well:
"We once laughed at the horseless carriage, the aeroplane, the telephone, the electric light, vitamins, radio, and even television! And now some of us laugh at outer space. God help us... in the future."
Criswell was a visionary.
Probably something a bit more specific than green energy. Some form of green energy that sounds impractical or like it shouldn't exist in the first place.
Unusually and exceedingly peculiar and altogether quite impossible to describe.I get the feeling green energy will be less of a sudden amazing advance, and more "do this now at whatever efficiency you happen to have or we're all fucked."
Interplanetary travel...thinking that's a harder no than it's ever been. Most of these amazing things that nobody expected were stuff that we just didn't really have any concept of application and/or precision manufacturing. With large-scale space travel, we have a very good idea of exactly what physical energy constraints make it not worth the trouble regardless of implementation.
edited 10th Jul '12 10:50:08 PM by Pykrete
When people sixty years ago imagined space travel, they took the travel of their time (a mix of sea and air) and extended it. They didn't see how computers would change us because that was a true unprecedented paradigm shift.
People did the see the Internet coming (read Arthur Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise) but not Internet culture. Which is perhaps all the better for their sanity.
On a general note: there was a feeling in the late nineteenth century that science had pinned down all the major principles of physics, and from then on the remaining discoveries would be mostly clarifying laws working only at the sub-atomic level and explaining oddities with the speed of light. Within a few decades, studying light led to relativity and the sub-atomic led to quantum mechanics, giving a whole new overlay to physics.
A blog that gets updated on a geological timescale.

So, I was searching on the internet and found this hilarious circa-2001 rant on why VHS tapes are superior to dvd: http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.8.24.112921.289.html
I'm in awe at how funny these sorts of things can be a decade later.
Also, Zip disks are going to overtake floppies any day now, trust me on this.
edited 17th Jun '12 7:26:40 PM by cfive