'By the 1990s the cost of computing would probably be halved, Lord Hirshfield said during a House of Lords debate.'
This is how a story opened in Electronics Weekly's issue of June 18th 1969 showing that Their Lordships talked as much balls in the 1960s as they do today.
In fact, computing costs reduced by a factor of 1,000 between 1970 and 1990, thanks to
From undue pessimism about the pace of technology, His Lordship veered to undue optimism predicting that, by the 1990s: "We shall be building houses with electronic walls which will allow people to receive information from computer networks in their homes and offices."
He was probably a decade or so out on that one if we take flat panels to be 'electronic walls'.
The EW story continues: 'By about 1975 cards and paper tape in computers would be obsolete and oral in-put would be general by about 1980.'
Well His Lordship was OK on the first bit, but hopelessly out on the second bit. Oral input is still dodgy today let alone 1980.
'By the beginning of the 1980s we shall experience one million-word desk-size or possibly even brief-case-size computers' added Lord Hirshfield.
Here he was pretty much spot on, the Apple II introduced at the end of the 1970s had two five and a quarter inch floppies each capable of storing 720Kbytes.
However he went astray with his next prediction: "Books and libraries as sources of factual material will be superseded by computer files by the mid-1980s."
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