1. - "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.

2. In 1943, Thomas J Watson, President of IBM, supposedly said "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers".

3. "640K ought to be enough for anybody." or "No one will need more than 637 kilobytes of memory for a personal computer." are two variants of the same quote, often misattributed to Bill Gates in 1981. Gates has repeatedly denied ever saying this, and he points out that it has never been attributed to him with a proper source. In fact, the memory limitation was due to the hardware architecture of the IBM PC.

4. "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works" - Clifford Stoll, 1995

5. - "We will never make a 32 bit operating system." Bill Gates

6. "Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput" Sir Alan Sugar, British entrepreneur, 2005.

7. "Spam will be a thing of the past in two years time." - Bill Gates, 2004

8. "The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks." Matthew Lynn, in Bloomberg after the January announcement in 2007

9. - "Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop - because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds." TIME, 1966, in one sentence writing off e-commerce long before anyone had ever heard of it.

10. Clifford Stoll argued in 1995 that e-books would never take off because "...reading on a screen was a chore, and unlike a hardcover you couldn't take your computer to the beach"

11. "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time." - Bill Gates, 1987

12. "People won t want to play these electronic games for more than a week, not once we start selling pinball machines for the home," - Gus Bally, Arcade Inc., 1979.

13. "The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most." IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox, saying the photocopier had no market large enough to justify production, 1959.

14. When Associates of David Sarnoff was asked to invest in the radio in 1921, he stated that "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?".

15. - "But what... is it good for?" IBM executive Robert Lloyd, speaking in 1968 microprocessor, the heart of today's computers.

16. "Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons." Popular Mechanics, March 1949.

17. "We don t need you. You haven t got through college yet" - Hewlett-Packard s rejection of Steve Jobs, who went on to found Apple Computers

18. "I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." - The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.

19. "With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use." - 1954 edition of Modern Mechanics Magazine

20. Wayne Rosig, at the time at Sun Microsystems, predicted: "It s a waste to have hundreds of computers in a building that share nothing but AC power".

21. "By the end of calendar year 1999, the Mac platform will have the best gaming machines available to the general consumer." the usually-wise Robert Paul Leitlao, in 1998.

22. "The expectation on the iPod is that HP s version will probably outsell Apple s version relatively quickly." Rob Enderle, quoted in MacObserver in August 2004

23. "There's just not that many videos I want to watch," lamented Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube, in March 2005

24. "Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition." Dennis Gabor, British physicist and author of Inventing the Future, 1962.

25. "These Google guys, they want to be billionaires and rock stars and go to conferences and all that. Let us see if they still want to run the buiness in two to three years." Bill Gates, on Sergey Brin and Larry Page, 2003 Bill Gates that year.

Autor: Matthew K. Brooks