**“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” —Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
**“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” — Ken Olsen, CEO and Founder, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
**”640K ought to be enough for anybody.” Bill Gates in 1981
**“The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, 1843.
**(About the idea of a steamship) “What Sir? Would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck?…I have no time to listen to such nonsense.” — Napoleon Bonaparte statement in 1805 to Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat
Albert Einstein
**”The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost.” — Steve Jobs, 1996.
** “Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within ten years.”— Alex Lewyt inventor and manufacturer of vacuum cleaners, 1955.
**”My invention, [the motion picture camera], can be exploited…as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever.” — Auguste Lumière co-developed the cinema camera in 1895.
**”Man will not fly for fifty years.” — Wilbur Wright, 1901, before first motor-powered flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903.
**”Video [TV] won’t be able to hold onto 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, motion-picture producer, 1946.
With benefit of hindsight, these assertions ((Thanks to resources on the Internet, such as Don’t Quote Me, it is easy to compile lists of quotations such as this.)) remind us of the precariousness of predictions about technology. As Yogi Berra apparently said, “It