I think Bill Gates once mocked the idea that anyone would need more than 640KB of memory.
Have I jumped through the looking glass? A majority of posts on this thread are adding to ignorance and repeating old urban myths.
I think a lot of financial experts believed that while housing prices may at some time peak, there was absolutely no way they would ever fall.
Do you think cars break even financially?
Hardly! Here in my state, taxes on cars & gas don’t even pay for a third of the cost of the roads – the rest is subsidized by the general fund of the state. And that’s just the basic cost of building & maintaining the roads themself, to say nothing about the many auxiliary services like the cops to patrol them, hospital emergency rooms to help auto accident victims, courts to deal with driving offenses, electricity to run traffic lights, etc.
Frankly, I don’t think there are any transportation systems that break even – they are all subsidized. And have been all through history, as far back as the Roman Empire using chain gangs to build the cobblestone roads that all led to Rome.
But IBM was NOT the foremost manufacturer of computers, in 1943. They sold mainly punch card equipment (and punch cards) – the digital computer was a threat to their cash cow business.
Rather like asking the head of a landline phone company how big a market they foresee for these new ‘cellular’ phones.
According to this site:
http://www.catchoursmile.com/myweb/Highlights.htm
in 1958, you could fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco on PSA Airlines for $11.81. Apparently a lot of Southwest’s business model was based on what PSA had already done.
Actually, in 1943 there weren’t any manufacturers of computers. But saying that computers was “a threat to their business” is absurd – they were the most likely to become computer manufacturers, and did so.
Even if they were only punch card manufacturers and didn’t go on to computers, computers used a LOT of punch cards until the mid-1970s. That’s not a threat to their business, it’s a BOON.
This historical currency converter says that would be $88.94 in present US money. I’ve never flown on any small regional airlines in the US, does that amount sound the same? Does it include airport fees and the other bullshit stuff tacked on to the price of the ticket?
There’s the old standard – the student who
Steves Wozniak and Jobs had their “personal computer” rejected by HP, then started Apple Computer. I’m entertained by the fact that college dropouts like Wozniak, Jobs and Bill Gates eventually found gainful employment. Per the OP, I think the mindset of people you’re looking for is expressed thusly:
That would be about the same as the current Southwest fare. However, they do have advance-purchase, non-refundable net fares now from time to time that are considerably lower. Consider, though, that service is much poorer now and conditions are far more cramped and uncomfortable.
IIRC she also once said that she didn’t believe there would be a woman Prime Minister in her lifetime.
And not nearly as many men are wearing fedoras. That sucks right there.
Didn’t someone once prove mathmatecally that flight was impossible ?
Only for someone to point out that insects and birds did it everyday.
As a mega Science Fiction buff in my teens I KNOW that the future started in 2000 A.D. and the proof is that we landed on the moon thirty years before, have satellites and a manned space station and have sent robot explorers to Mars and the outer Solar System.
We also have nuclear power, the Channel tunnel and mobile phones.
And not forgetting of course the world wide sharing of the sum total of all Human knowledge, the Internet…which most probably has expanded the total of male masturbation globally beyond all historical precedents, spread far and wide untenable conspiracy theories and allowed a lot of people who can’t be bothered to read or study: to become instant experts on subjects that they know absoloutley nothing about by Googling dodgey Web sites that back up their opinions.
Also I don’t think that many people foresaw the demise of the Soviet Union, the arise of a de facto European super state and the huge expansion of international extreme Islamism .
The single most impossible and unpredicatble thing that’s occurred in my lifetime is that the West was able to achieve total victory in the Cold War without firing a single shot on the USSR. Yes, some predicted the Soviet Union would sooner or later collapse. But no one thought the USSR would simply wilt.
Not really. Male masturbation is largely controlled by human hormones, which trigger sexual feeling at an appropriate age, and also decline with age. This occurs pretty much the same across all cultures and throughout history, as far as we can tell.
The internet has just made inspirational material more readily available. (Though even in the 1950’s in the rural Midwest, ‘dirty magazines’ were easily available.) The total amount of male masturbation in not likely to have changed significantly.
Nikola Tesla was infamous for promising far more than he could deliver, but he did have a good imagination. The following is from a 1912 article, Wireless Power:
David Sarnoff was head of RCA, then in a futile competition against IBM in the mainframe computer field. Here’s what he had to say in 1964:
But I’m partial to Carl Dreher’s 1977 response:
I don’t think there is much comparison between the DC-3 and DC-4 aircraft flown by PSA in the 1950s and the Boeing 737 flown by Southwest. If you think that flying in a DC-4 in 1958 was more cramped and uncomfortable than flying in a modern 737, then you have never seen a DC-4. While they were revolutionary in their time, the DC-4 was a loud, slow aircraft. The noise and vibration meant that you had to shout to be heard by the person sitting next to you.
The DC-3 was notable in that, for the first time, you could make a transcontinental flight across the U.S. in only 15-18 hours with three refueling stops. A DC-4 could make the same trip in only 12 hours, while a 737 can make the flight in about 6 hours. Again, no comparison.
So er, alll, my …research, was for nothing.