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I finally dug out a 1999 article that said the internet was a fad | Bad Tech Predictions - HW Forums

I finally dug out a 1999 article that said the internet was a fad

Found it in a box at my mom's house last weekend. It was from a tech magazine my dad kept. They said online shopping would never replace catalogs. Also claimed email was just a toy for college kids. Makes me laugh now since I order everything through my phone. Has anyone else found old predictions that aged worse than milk?

2 comments

2 Comments

shane_ross3mo ago

and that article you found is hilarious, I actually had a similar moment cleaning out my grandpa's garage a couple years back. He had this old copy of Newsweek from like 1995 where they were dead serious that the internet was just gonna be a passing thing for nerds. They even had a quote from some expert saying nobody would ever read books on a screen, which is pretty funny now since my Kindle goes everywhere with me. The real kicker was the ad section showing a laptop that cost four thousand dollars and weighed like fifteen pounds, I showed it to my nephew and he couldn't stop laughing. What got me was how confident they sounded, like they had it all figured out and we were fools for thinking differently. Makes you wonder what we're dead wrong about today that people will laugh at in twenty years.

ninas703mo ago

The confidence people had back then is wild. They really thought the internet was a passing phase, like a hula hoop or something. I mean, look at us now, we can't even go to the bathroom without our phones. That Newsweek article you mentioned sounds like a time capsule of bad guesses. What cracks me up is how certain they were, like they had a crystal ball that was just broken. Makes you wonder what we're all so sure about today that'll sound dumb in twenty years, right?