A Failed Prediction: The Computer: Part 2

Who said the computer would fail? Well, I thought it would be fun to track down some references that might be of interest to the reader...

Here are two quotes from this web page
Computers in the future may...perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.
- Popular Mechanics, 1949.
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
- Kenneth Olsen, president and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.

And of course - going to Wikipedia - there are a number of quotes...
This entire section has been taken directly from Wikipedia.

• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977. (See [3] for historical context.)
• "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." -- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.[1]
• "640K ought to be enough for anybody."[1] or "No one will need more than 637 kilobytes of memory for a personal computer."
  Two variants of the same quote, often misattributed to Bill Gates in 1981. Gates has repeatedly denied ever saying this, and he points out that it has never been attributed to him with a proper source. In fact, the memory limitation was due to the hardware architecture of the IBM PC.[2]
• "But what... is it good for?" -- IBM executive Robert Lloyd, speaking in 1968 about the microprocessor, the heart of today’s computers.[citation needed]
• "We will never make a 32 bit operating system." -- Bill Gates[3]

The page that the above quotes were taken from can be found here.

I thought that these quotes were interesting - but are they all true? As with all things on the web, they should be validated. See Part 3 for validation...