My Failed Tech Predictions
Tue 04 August 2026
Tech writers love making at times outlandish predictions. I remember in the early 90s thinking back very glibly about John C. Dvorak's prediction (more of a comment, really) that the mouse was a questionable, unproven peripheral, and probably wouldn't ever take off as a main input device. How ironic that I now rather wish he was right. 😄
I only ever remember making one really solid prediction (in the form of a prediction, i.e., "I think that in the future..."), but now reflecting on the past, I had some definite thoughts about the future of technology at various stages of my life that could be described as predictions:
1985: Everyone Will Become Programmers
...and programming would reach its zenith as a true craft.
Holy crap, did I miss the mark, there.
I got introduced to computing in my Elementary school years, and I was utterly enthralled with my boxy digital friends. The logic, simplicity, and power of the computer was amazing to me, and I figured that everyone would want to learn how to use these devices, many even becoming programmers.
Forgive a little snobbery, but I don't really consider most programmers to be programmers at this point. Even before the scourge of "Vibe Coding," the art of programming had been denigrated to yelling into a prompt, whether that prompt was an LLM, a simple web search, or even just a quick reference volume. The sense of discipline, pride in craft, and desire for deep understanding vanished, and you can trace its absence with the steady drop-off in the frequency in which people talked about "elegant hacks" with pride. There's nothing to say when you're not proud of your work, when you run through the course of a project merely relieved that the blasted thing works, sometimes not even understanding why.
I'm sure there are still MANY programmers that still do excellent work, who take pride in what they do. But I doubt they are rewarded for that excellence. Programming has become perfunctory, a means to an end. So no wonder that so many in my former field embrace LLMs as a way to speed up the process. They don't want to create, they just want to have. The ends justify the means, to them.
1990: MacOS Will Take Over the World
I was given a Macintosh SE for Christmas in 1989, and I was absolutely smitten with that device. It was an incredible upgrade to my venerable-but-dusty Commodore 64, and I drank of the Macintosh Kool-Aid deeply. I saw the Mac as so vastly superior to the DOS machines my friends had, I figured the Macintosh would become the dominant form of computer in short time. Little did I know about economics, market forces, and of course, sparkling corporate espionage.
While the Macintosh today is probably more popular than it's ever been (thanks to Apple finally, after so many decades, producing properly affordable laptops), it's technically not the same MacOS that I knew and loved then. It's an odd UNIX clone wearing an increasingly unrecognizable Macintosh skin. The MacOS that I grew up with officially died in 2007 with Mac OS X Leopard, which was the first version to remove the Classic environment (a virtual machine running Mac OS 9).
Don't get me wrong, I actually loved Leopard, and I loved now "classic" Mac OS X's UNIXiness, but it's still not the same OS that I grew up with, and honestly, the recent versions of MacOS that I've seen don't even resemble the Mac OS X versions that I loved nearly twenty years ago.
1991: Holographic Storage Will Be the Future
I don't know if anyone else remembers this, but in the early 90s (particularly in Austin), there were many rumblings about future storage technology involving actual holograms that promised to provide data storage in the then-inconceivable TERABYTE range. There were several small research firms investigating this tech, and they seemed perennially on the verge of a breakthrough that would make the holo storage tech cheap and viable. Even Star Trek: The Next Generation featured optical data storage and processing. Holo was the future!
How boring that almost all storage tech today is still spinning rust or spicy EEPROM. 😄
1992: The Information Age Will Change the World For the Better. The Internet Will Set Us Free.
I remember getting a copy of SimEarth some time in the early 90s, and I recall that one of the stages of development for human society in the game was called The Information Age.
Page 143 of the SimEarth Manual
Page 205 of the SimEarth Manual
(Well, three out of four ain't bad.) 😄
I was energized to think of the impending information age: global communications, the free flow of information, incredible knowledge always just a fingertip away. It would revolutionize society — for the better!
Yeah, take me back to the 90s, any day. 😅
1995: We Will Have SCSI Modems In the Future
This is the one prediction I actually remember saying as a prediction, and I recall my coworker looking at me askance when I said it. But follow me on the logic: Modems were getting faster and faster (I had no idea that 56kbps would be a hard cap, but cable modems technically are modems), and serial ports had a hard limit of a good bit less than 1mbps. Modems would have to switch to a faster connection soon, and the only one I knew of that was both fast and potentially general-purpose was SCSI.
In my thinking, it just wasn't possible for serial ports to carry information fast enough for where we were heading with modems (and the internet in general), and SCSI was the answer. Ironically, it was that same year that FireWire was standardized, but it wasn't actually introduced in a product (that the average person would know about) for four more years.
But when it did, it utterly blew my mind concerning what a serial port could be capable of, and parallel ports have mostly died off from common use since then.
So, while we generally don't use anything that the average person would recognize as a modem anymore, nor do most people have SCSI devices in the home anymore, our modern USB wifi adapters are more or less in the spirit of what I was predicting, even though I got the implementation details absolutely wrong. 😂
1999: Mobile Technology Will be an Empowering Disruptor
I got my first PDA in 1999, a Palm IIIx. I loved finally having a digital device that could fit in my pocket. It obviously wasn't internet-connected, but it was incredibly useful for taking notes, keeping appointments, having a phone book (remember those? 😄), etc.
A couple of accessories made it absolutely indispensable for me: first, I got a folding keyboard which allowed me to quickly touch-type on it for my class notes, and second, I got an acoustic coupler modem for my Palm, called the "PocketMail BackFlip." All I had to do was plug my Palm into the device, flip open the folding transmitter/speaker, hold it up to a landline handset, and press a button on the side of the device. It would emit the DTMF tone to dial their service, sync my email, and disconnect.
I could then put the Backflip back in my bag, and sit and read and write emails on my Palm at my liesure. It was AMAZING! :D
The next year, I got my first cellphone, and was enthralled with it, purchasing eight different phones during the first decade.
Sadly, I didn't really get to enjoy the golden era of smartphones (i.e., pre-iPhone smartphones, 2002ish-2010ish). My first actual smartphone was a Blackberry "Pearl" 8120 (the kind with the really awkward 20-key keyboard), and I only used it for three months.
I soon after got an iPhone 4 (a gift from my wonderful grandmother 🥹), and got to enjoy the golden era of iOS, before that became the rather enpoopified platform it is today.
I really blame iPhones and iPads for dumbing people down. People used to actually understand how to use computers. They don't anymore. Even people who I looked up to as brilliant technical folks are starting to act a bit like iPad kids, and have very little appreciation or patience for technical complexity.
"It's just a tool" is literally the worst mentality. I'm sure mechanics have passionate feelings about their preferred brand of tools, and the right tools for the job, so the analogy simply doesn't make any sense to me.
2000: The Turing Test Won't Be Beaten In My Lifetime
I remember playing with MegaHAL in 2000, which used to be in the Debian repos. It was a simple Markov-based chatbot, and the way it put words together was kind of humorous and disjointed. I believe the autocomplete on modern smartphones uses a very similar technology, so if you've ever played the Autocomplete Game on your phone, you're generating very similar text.
Then, of course, about four years ago, the infamous chatgpt blew all of that right out of the water. I'm not saying that it's impossible to tell when you're talking to an LLM, but the entire basis of the Turing test was that the average person wouldn't be able to tell, rather than a computer scientist, or someone who has developed the skill of sussing out chatbot text.
And it is truly impressive and horrifying how well modern chatbots can fool humans.
Category: Tech
Tags:
Computing
Hobbies
Non-religious post
Productivity
Retrocomputing
UNIX
Modified image of a stack of thinkpads taken originally from https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/17xf8kl/my_thinkpad_stack/
