Doh!!!

But they WEREN'T predictions! They were MORONIC statements! They were almost CERTAINLY done to try to deceive some people. They KNEW they were WRONG, it was OBVIOUS!

DEC made COMPUTERS! At the time, they were the second largest computer maker in the world. Around 1970, a product hit the stands with a FRENZY! It was MORE than front page news, it made COVERS! It built several megaliths. It was starting to be adopted everywhere. What was it? The MICROPROCESSOR! Hobbyists started building computers! Several companies started MASS PRODUCING systems! One such company started doing it for the general public around 1975? It's name? APPLE! HECK, companies started making SOFTWARE! DOZENS of them! One that started selling for the public around 1975 was MICROSOFT! Small companies had a disadvantage, and the microcomputer could put them on an equal footing. So that statement by Olsen was STUPID! Frankly, I'm sure he KNEW!

IRONICALLY, they came out with about 6 micros, that I knew of:

1. A HORRIBLE looking, poorly cased, poorly supported, EXPENSIVE, VT100 hybrid. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!?!?!?

2-3 Various micro versions of an obsolete system they made using 100% proprietary hardware/supplies, and basically only had a 100% propriety word processor. I would have FIRED a guy for suggesting that it be built.

4-5 versions of the rainbow. Properly tweaked, and with STANDARD supplies, it COULD have taken over the market! Alas, DEC decided to NOT tweak it, KEEP proprietary supplies, and decided to BETRAY the OEMs, so they could be SURE that they would go bankrupt. JUST to make sure, they opened special stores, frustrated OEM paperwork, and decided to put everything in FANCY packages!

6. The ALPHA. Expensive, and provided about the time of the OEM fiasco, it was pretty much DOOMED! CompaQ, HP, and I believe DELL, sold it for a while, but it was TOO LATE!

Olsen's statement would be like me saying the 1TBdrive won't catch on! HECK, I heard that teradatas largest system is about 10PB! That is approximately 10,000 TERABYTES!!!!!!
Although that is a RIDICULOUS amount of storage, and may be able to store line item data on every sale of every company on the planet, for at least several years, and still have enough to run a company like Google, they are BOUND to find a way to fill it up. Just clickstream data for M/S's site could dwarf everything else they have. HECK, If I never deleted anything I wanted to save, I could have maybe 10TB.

The Automobile was being built by many. It doesn't need the special care, cleanup, feeding of a horse, and can go farther quicker. Granted the first ones weren't that great but history showed, EVEN THEN, that such things IMPROVE! DUMB STATEMENT! BTW by the time ford got a lawyer, he was probably WELL on his way to doing very well.

Television was a STATUS SYMBOL! People FLOCKED to see it. SURE it was B&W only, and didn't receive that well, etc... but with all the shows, etc... that could be on it, they should have realized it FINE! BESIDES, where there many movies in color? Probably NOT. I'm not sure when color film came out. I DO know that, when I was a kid, B&W film was a LOT cheaper. And Desi Arnaz is famous for buying EXPENSIVE film to tape the I love lucy show. Were it not for that, many of the episodes would not be viable today!

And television was 100% FREE! Seeing the shows in person, if even possible, could have been EXPENSIVE. In the long run, people may have SAVED money!

Steve