[laumars]

Normally I might agree, but tablets where already being common place in sci-fi (Star Trek TNG, 2001 Space Odyssey, etc) and PDAs were starting to get prototyped in real life around that time too. So we are not talking about technology that was completely alien to mankind in the 90s.

In fact the reason people were predicting great things for future tech and the internet (which the author of this article is arguing against) is because it was technology already emerging - not some imaginary theoretical stuff.

Ok, the pace of change and the specifics (smart phones with high speed internet, eink displays, etc) might still have taken people by surprise, but the rest isn't that shocking. I mean back in the mid 90s I was building 3D websites in VRML and just assumed by the 2010s all sites would have a rich, communal, skeuomorphism interface. Clear I was wrong on some parts (thankfully) but not that far off the mark.

So the signs were already there but the author was too busy trying to imagine those predictions being utilised with then current technology. You could argue that is a failure of imagination on his part but I'm tempted to go further and say it was down right ignorant. He's clearly techy enough to understand the then current tech better than most yet failed to notice the emerging technologies. And he clearly witnessed the evolution of technology for the 10 years leading up to the 90s yet assumed hardware would suddenly just stagnate at that point. That was his biggest mistakes and ultimately why his predictions were so out of sync with what many others had predicted (yhise if whom did see the change happening and the future potential they had).

To be honest though, I do wonder how much of his comments where based on his own comfort zone and not liking a the thought of a digital future so allowed his own prejudices to bias his vision of the future.