No, not the time when I predicted that Hillary would handily beat Donald Trump for the presidency. Oh, sure, she was vastly more qualified. She had been a part of two very successful administrations and been a productive senator in her own right. But I failed to measure the breadth and depth of “Hillary hate” in this country. That, coupled with the large number of people who felt left out of the 7 year steady economic recovery from near total financial collapse, was enough to overcome the hijinx of an amoral narcissist that makes fun of women’s looks, the war record of captured American heroes, and the involuntary spastic movements of the physically challenged. Who knew?
And I’m not talking about that other time. You know, when I predicted Gore would roll over Bush. I mean, REALLY!!! Al Gore was an important part of the longest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history. Unemployment at all-time lows, stock market at all-time highs, prosperity, peace. All this and the national debt was actually going down, not up. All-in-all, not a bad record to run on. But experts will tell you that political choices are mostly made with the gut, not the head. And it seemed more Americans really would have a beer with George W than boring Al. I have stopped making political predictions.
The prediction I want to talk about, the one where I swung and missed and fell down in the dirt, was one I made way back in 1984. After buying my first personal computer, I resolutely stated that they were destined to be a hobbyist’s play toy and would never catch on with the mass public. Boy, was I wrong.
I saw my first personal computer in 1982, an Apple II. A friend of mine bought it, and it mostly gathered dust in a corner of his family room. The Apple II, along with the PET-1000 and Radio Shack’s TRS-80 debuted in 1977. Apple II had 4k of memory and a very good color video board and display. It also came with a hefty $1300 price tag, ($5200 in today’s dollars). The 4k of memory would gradually grow to 48k. Other popular computers were Atari’s 800 and later, the Commodore 64. When Atari released the 1200XL, I bought it, my first computer. The 1200XL was both more expensive and in many ways inferior to the 800 model, but it had an incredible, oh-my-gosh 64k memory.
Personal computers of the time did two things really well, gaming and word-processing. There was also some clunky spreadsheet programs like Visicalc, but business use of the personal computer did not begin to take off until the introduction of the Lotus-1-2-3 spreadsheet in 1983. But dedicated game machines and word-processors were cheaper and better than a general purpose programmable computer. I thought there would be no widespread interest in personal computers beyond the geek class writing their smallish BASIC programs while trying to move a pixel around on a screen.
And then a strange thing happened. Computers started talking to other computers. Attempts at first were modest. Die-hard geeks started their own bulletin board systems (BBS). Communication was at 300 bits/second over phone lines with modems at each end. It was slow, text only communication. The BBS’s were themed. You called one phone number for a political BBS, another number for a religious BBS, another just to talk computers.
In 1996 a friend of mine at work asked me if I had tried this new thing called ‘the internet’. And the rest, as they say, is history.