Famous Predictions - What A Hoot!

• "Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances." - Dr. Lee DeForest, 'Father of Radio and Grandfather of Television'.
• "The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." - Admiral William Leahy, US.
• There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." - Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923.
• "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." - Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949.
• "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1933.
• "I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." - The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.
• "But what ... is it good for?" - Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
• "640 K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981.
• "This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." - Western Union Internal memo, 1876.
• "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" - David Sarnoff's Associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920's.
• "The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible." - A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
• "I am just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper," - Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With the Wind."
• "A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make," - Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies.
• "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." - Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
• "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.
• "If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." - Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads.
• "Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy." - Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.
• "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." - Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1029.
• "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." - Aarechal Ferdinand Foch, professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre, France.
• "Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H. Duell. Commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899.
• "The super computer is technologically impossible. It would take all of the water that flows over Niagara Falls to cool the heat generated by the number of vacuum tubes required." - Professor of Electrical Engineering, New York University.
• "I don't know what use any one could find for a machine that would make copies of documents. It certainly couldn't be a feasible business by itself." - The head of IBM, refusing to back the idea, forcing the inventor to found Xerox.
• "Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction." - Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872.
• "The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon." - Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.

And last, but not least ...

• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, President, Chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.

Tag:Predictions

• Current Mood: amused

Life's Choices

I came across this Blog written in 1907 for a good friend in Multiply (S.O.) I am re-posting it, this time, for all my friends near or far ...

Many of us must have at one time or another imagined what our life would have been like, had we chosen a different direction this or that way, when we first set out on our life's journey as an adult, instead of the one we had taken.

I believe this doesn't just happen to people who are not happy or content with their spouse, partner, job, career, or how life had generally turned out. Those who are blessed with a satisfactory life too think about it I am sure, as a way to reconfirm a decision well made, by wisdom, impulse or based on calculated risk. Or the ones who had at times thought of making a major life change but had decided, for better or worse, not to, for which they now have proven reason to congratulate themselves for their own foresight and decisiveness.

What about all those twist and turns, crossed roads, fork junctions, temptations and disastrous traps dotted along the path of life? Each and everyone of them need our decisions to follow or avoid. Have we made the right choices? The answers, alas, take time to show. Years or even a whole life time. When they do, you laugh or cry, but in either case your destiny is set ...

Until you go ahead, and make yet another choice. There are always choices even though they might not be obvious. 

Tags: Choices,CrossRoads

• Current Mood: awake

Prescription For Love

I am sure you have all had love poems or notes left in your message boxes from time to time, canned or original. Unfortunately far more often the former. Just when you got to the last line and your eyes were welling up with tears of happiness, imagining your lover laboriously composing the soul warming verses, only to find the bottom line that says 'Something.com and urges you to click on it, promising endless supplies of such borrowed sentiments. It conjured up a picture in my mind the number of 'professional lovers' who turn out hundreds of these love literature each day, then some of them go home in the evening to a precooked TV dinner alone and an empty bed.

I guess not too many of us remember or even know that there was a time, during generations and way back in the long human history, love letters and poems were a part of everybody's life, at least for those blessed enough to have found love, and those in the hope of finding it. Each letter from your beloved was the first thing you looked for amongst the day's post. You could tell the one from him/her by that special handwriting, the colour of the envelope had been chosen to be his/her signature or to please you. Even slightly scented maybe if the sender was female. You opened the letter ever so carefully as not to ruin it's shape, with your heart pounding, longing, anticipating ...

You read it in private, fast at first because you were always in a great hurry to know the entire content; then you went over it slowly, once, twice, most likely many times. Lines and lines of words, each tenderly written by hand, wrapped with love that delights and touches the heart and caresses the soul. You close you eyes for a while, let the words dance about in your mind, trying to remember them, savour them, before you lovingly put it away in a special place, together with all the others, thrilled how that little drawer was pilling up, filled to the brim with love!

That, lamentably, an lost art today, substituted by SMS on mobiles written in shorthand and symbols; the one today you decipher to be saying: 'luf U. quickie 2Nite ur plas?' Or the one less coarse, an email amongst the dozens you receive each day, looking exactly the same as the one reminding you to pay your back tax; or the one looking suspiciously like spam. You pick the one from the new lover you had fallen head over heel with to click first, only to feel the strange sensation that you had already read that before ... It's wording is identical as that you had once from Mr. Wrong or Miss Error, whom you had sent off packing sometime back. They are both obviously 'Something.com' members.

I have even had some love poems and messages hidden in a web-site address, which indicated that if I wanted to know what the message was about, I needed to click on the site URL to find out! Naturally I never bother doing so. You see, also too much bother for me to find out.

Tag:ProfessionalLovers

• Current Mood: bored