25 Historic Technology Predictions

It's the end of the year and you won't be able to escape a wave of innovation predictions for straightway year. Most of them seem to fairly reasonable, nevertheless they aren't quite as aggressive and entertaining anymore as they were in the past. Here are our 25 favorite innovation predictions that were not specifically true.

1943 - Thomas Watson: "I think there is a world market for like as not five computers." Fact: Gartner predicts that 352.4 million PCs will be sold in 2011. Including the iPad and other tablet devices, more than 400 million personal computing devices are forecasted to be sold then year.

1949 - Popular Mechanics: "Computers hereafter may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." Fact:Apple's 11" Macbook Air weighs 2.3 pounds.

1962 - Dennis Gabor: "Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, nevertheless the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition." Fact: The first email was reportedly sent in 1971. Among the first commercial email services was CompuServe, which began offering such services in 1978 in accordance with the name Infoplex.

1968 - Business Week: "With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market." Fact: According to The Wall Street Journal, Japanese car manufacturers currently hold a combined 38% of the U.S. new car sales market.

British bank manager to John Edwards

1969 - A British bank manager to John Edwards, a former RAF radio engineer, when he asked for 250,000 British pounds of investment in cell phone innovation: "No one wants to carry around a phone all the time." Fact: There is a dispute who actually invented the cell phone. Edwards to all appearances developed the cell phone parallel to efforts in the U.S. and got stuck when he ran out for money. He maintains until today that he is the true inventor of the cell phone and says that he forgot to patent the research, because he was simply excited about the research. Today, he holds several other patents just as the hijack alarm in air planes.

1983 - Bill Gates): "Microsoft will never make a 32-bit operating system." Fact: Windows NT was Microsoft's first 32-bit operating system in 1994.

1995 - Bob Metcalfe: "The Internet will collapse in 1996." Fact: According to Internet World Stats, there are currently 1.97 billion Internet users. Attacks on free speech and spam remain the biggest threats to the Internet. If not, it is all in all going strong. IDC estimated the number of Internet users in 1995 at 16 million.

1997 - Nathan Myhrvold: "Apple is already dead." Fact: Apple's stock closed 1997 with a price of $13.13 and a market cap of about $12 billion. Today, Apple has a market cap of $297 billion, ahead of Microsoft's $242 billion. Apple as well surpassed Microsoft in quarterly earnings.

1999 - Hans Moravec, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University: "By 2050, $1000 worth of computing power will equal the processing power of all human brains on earth." I could not resist adding this one to this list. Someone should keep this one in a diary and check back in 39 years. By 2020, we are predicted to get the first exascale supercomputers, which can deliver 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 calculations per second for a little more than $1,000, we assume.)

2003 - Bill Gates: "These Google guys, they want to be billionaires and rock stars and go to conferences and all that. Let us see if they all in all want to run the business in two to three years." Fact: Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin are ranked among the 25 wealthiest people in the world with an estimated wealth of $17.5 billion each. The do not appear at conferences very often anymore.

2005 - Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray: "Apple could release a 1 TB iPod by the end of 2010." Fact: There is no need for a 1 TB iPod. The hard drive model is dead and 64 GB is the most you can get right but. Your storage space will be in the cloud hereafter.