collected from various sources
Domingos S.L. Soares
“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country, and have talked with
the best people in business administration. I can assure you on the highest
authority that data processing is a fad and won't last out the year.”
— Editor in charge of business books at Prentice-Hall
publishers, responding to Karl V. Karlstrom (a junior
editor who had recommended a manuscript on the new
science of data processing), c. 1957
“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their
home.”
— Ken Olson, President of DEC, World Future Society
Convention, 1977
“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.”
— Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, c. 1895
“As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest
parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket
is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one
considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one
begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really
starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor
maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left.
Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing
of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to
re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum
against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the
knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
— ‘A Severe Strain on the Credulity’, New York Times Editorial, 1920
“Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and
weights 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes
and perhaps weight 1 1/2 tons.”
— Popular Mechanics, March 1949
“What the hell is it good for?”
— Robert Lloyd (engineer of the Advanced Computing Systems
Division of IBM), to colleagues who insisted that the
microprocessor was the wave of the future, c. 1968
“Adding sound to movies would be like
putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.”
— actress Mary Pickford, 1925
See also some Einsteinian blunders.