Sarnoff's Vision

We share in and are living the vision predicted by (General) David Sarnoff in 1964.

(Sarnoff is the man who first picked up the Titanic distress messages in the USA, later formed RCA. During World War 2 he organised the Communications for the Allied D-Day Invasion. He was a prolific innovator).

"The computer will become the hub of a vast network of remote data stations and information banks feeding into the machine at a transmission rate of a billion or more bits of information a second.

Laser channels will vastly increase both data capacity and the speeds with which it will be transmitted.

Eventually, a global communications network handling voice, data and facsimile will instantly link man to machine--or machine to machine--by land, air, underwater, and space circuits.

[The computer] will affect man's ways of thinking, his means of education, his relationship to his physical and social environment, and it will alter his ways of living...

[Before the end of the century, these forces] will coalesce into what unquestionably will become the greatest adventure of the human mind."

--from David Sarnoff, by Eugene Lyons, 1966.

OTHER'S PREDICTIONS

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." -- Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

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

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943