Historically bad predictions of technology’s future

I’ve been reading the books Paul recommended, Commodore: A Company on the Edge 2nd Edition by Brian Bagnall, TOO BLUE!: The IBM PC from an Acorn to a Renegade by Dennis Andrews, Almost Perfect by W.E. Pete Peterson. They got me thinking of my history of PC hardware and software purchases over the years and how almost none of them held up long-term or even in the short-term.

My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20 I got for around $90 at a K-Mart in the summer of 1993. Around the same time I could have gotten a Commodore 64 for about a $100 more. Of course at that time our finances were so strapped that the extra hundred wasn’t readily available. I got about a year’s use out of the Vic-20 and held onto it for a year after that without learning much new that last year.

My parents bought an IBM XT clone in 1985 or 1986. I learned a word processing program my mother got from a college class she took. It was a kludgy word processor, but it got me through my last couple of years of high school and part of college. I typed quite a few assignments on it when my classmates were handwriting or using a typewriter for their papers.

Around 1989 my parents upgraded to a 386SX machine with 2MB of RAM. The lack of the math co-processor would cause some irritation in the years that followed.

The one software purchase I made that held steady was Windows 3.0. I also bought Aldus PageMaker 4.0. I got quite a bit of use of and experience from that. I went all in with the Aldus products of FreeHand and PhotoStyler because Aldus offered major discounts to purchase the other two due to my PageMaker license.

In 1993 I got my own computer. I had become a little more computer literate by that point and did some research. I decided on a 486 DX 50Mhz. I opted on that because I thought it it was the fastest processor at the time. Apparently my research was lacking becausethe doubler chips that worked on the 33Mhz chips, but not on the 50Mhz had already come out by then. Still, that machine lasted me 5 years with hard drive upgrades and addition of a sound card and CD-ROM drive. (I do not miss IRQ settings!)

I took advantage of the student discounts to purchase WordPerfect for Windows 6 and Borland’s Quatro Pro. I wasn’t even aware of Microsoft’s suite of products. I had taken a college class using Microsoft Works. At least I didn’t buy that (though it was included with a PC I purchased in 1998.)

My first professional job was in digital prepress. I was introduced to Adobe’s line of products, Photoshop and Illustrator. I eventually got professional discounts on the Windows versions of both of those, which allowed me to get upgrades every few years for $99 each time.

I also got a professional discount on a Bernoulli drive. It had larger capacity than the Syquest drives at the time, I just didn’t realize how short lived their time in the Sun would be. Then I moved to Zip drives, which lasted a little longer and were adopted more globally.

By 1998 Microsoft and Adobe had better cemented their dominance. That made the choices going forward easier, if also limited. From that point my purchases were more viable going forward such as buying the MS Office Suite of products. Windows machines made sense, too.

I’ve still had my short-sighted technology purchases (usually driven by finances, much like in the past.) I bought a SANdisk MP3 player rather than an iPod. I bought some MP3s from Walmart’s program, which were non-functional within a couple of years when they abandoned and DRM support and could no longer work if copied because they couldn’t hit the DRM site.

I’m sure technology will continue to hit us with the Betamax/VHS type choices and I will continue to make the wrong choice.