Guy Kewney

If you predict the future, you get it wrong. That will always be true – with exceptions. For me, the past 30 years have been a succession of mistakes.

People have rubbed my face in some of those mistakes. In my first column for PCW, I sang the praises of associative memory.

It was, to my mind, a true revolution that would allow the memory storage device to make processing decisions, rather than having to wait for a central processor to read the memory, compare it, and perform a judgement. How could it fail to replace the Von Neumann architecture?

But it did. Other predictions that went wrong were more or less forgiveable, and the fact that they came in for mockery and scorn was partly a result of perceived disloyalty.

In the 1990s, having produced PCW’s Newsprint section for the best part of two decades, I ran away to earn more money from the newly launched rival PC Magazine. The PCW editor’s revenge was swift: he started a regular column of ‘Guy’s Past Blunders’ (using a different title, of course) and found plenty to choose from.

I didn’t take the job of writing the news for PCW in an attempt to become a futurologist. It was bleeding obvious to me that the microcomputer chip had the potential to transform society. I lacked the depth of insight available to writers such as Peter Laurie (a colleague of mine at New Scientist at the time) or Chris Evans (at the National Physical Laboratory), but even so I was astonished how many people were blind to the micro’s potential.

Today’s readers may not remember how expensive computer technology was. A friend built his own Altair computer and then had to buy a teletype to get data in and out of it because the glass teletype, or video display, was still a rarity. Whatever it printed disappeared off the top forever. And that teletype, printing at 30 characters a second, cost him well over £1,000.

My salary at the time was comfortable at £5,000 per year. “Nobody could afford a home computer,” said the typical pundit “and even if you could, you’d still need to spend three months’ salary on a teletype.” Only a fool would imagine such a thing becoming important to the average human.

So when I wrote in 1978: “We are on the edge of a revolution that will make the printing press, the telephone and the motor car look like minor items on a shopping list, as the population gets ‘on-line’, and from here on, the history of the computer will be history of society, not just of calculators,” it was, for many, simply proof of my naive ignorance.

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