My uncle dropped out of Waterloo in the early 70s because everyone figured there weren't enough computers for computer science to be useful.
Like Professor Frink said: "I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them"
I entered Waterloo in 2002 and I took "Computer Science for Business" where a confidently incorrect lady repeatedly told us all our jobs would be outsourced to India so we should all be managers instead.
20 years later and that person was the worst fucking professor I ever had.
The only reason I knew she was full of shit was because I was a second generation 'good at math class' person. It doesn't matter where you live or what non-logarithmic things cost, dialectical materialism is real.
People who thought jobs would go to India probably never did anything (or managed any work) that couldn't be outsourced there, hence why they thought this would happen in 100% of cases.
> It doesn't matter where you live, dialectical materialism is real.
I'm going to take this as a positive comment that scientific evidence based theories of the world generally work out correct: You were right to ignore the fantasists.
If you meant it some other way, do please elucidate
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
(of course in 1943 that was a totally reasonable thing to think considering they were the size of a small house and ran on thousands of vacuum tubes that needed constant replacing and started in the millions of dollars)
And it’s come full circle because today the majority of the Western world’s computing needs are served by five computers: Google’s, Facebook’s, Apple’s, Microsoft’s and Amazon’s.
Each of them consists of millions of individual devices, but the end user posting to Instagram or accessing their iCloud files doesn’t need to know any of that.
Sure, if you ignore the issue of how the user accesses them.
Even if you pretend the user has a dumb terminal, that's 5 computers that can each serve a hundred million users at once. Very very different from batch processing.
Also the original quote was about preorders for a single model in the united states.
Like Professor Frink said: "I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them"
I entered Waterloo in 2002 and I took "Computer Science for Business" where a confidently incorrect lady repeatedly told us all our jobs would be outsourced to India so we should all be managers instead.
20 years later and that person was the worst fucking professor I ever had.
The only reason I knew she was full of shit was because I was a second generation 'good at math class' person. It doesn't matter where you live or what non-logarithmic things cost, dialectical materialism is real.