Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, is fond of pointing out that every two years more computing is manufactured than existed on the planet previously. By 2000, Grove estimates, the PC industry will be shipping 100 million Pentium-style microprocessors a year. I think he’s wrong: he’ll be shipping 500 million.
Predictor: Negroponte, Nicholas
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Thomas A. Bass interviews MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte on the 10th anniversary of the Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he heads up an effort that spends $25 million a year “engineering the merger of newspapers, television, learning and computers.” Bass writes: ”Ten years after Negroponte began selling multimedia as rich terrain for scientific prospecting, he has been proved right. The human-computer interface that began as Negroponte’s promitional pitch is now the linchpin of an industry whose sales are pushing a trillion dollars a year … [The writer asks Negroponte why his original proposal for the Media Lab didn’t mention the Internet, and Negronponte answers:] ‘The Internet for us was like air. It was there all the time – you wouldn’t notice it existed unless it was missing. But the Internet as a major social phenomenon didn’t enter our radar until the advent of the World Wide Web, which was developed in Europe at CERN, beginning in 1989, by a team of physicists that included an alumnus of the Media Lab. That was what provoked the big change in the Internet. The speed [of the Internet’s popularization] has surprised everybody. Nobody predicted it, not even the founders of the Internet. ‘The Net and other online systems – not to mention the growing presence of personal computers [- are the agents switching us over to a digital world]. Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, is fond of pointing out that every two years more computing is manufactured than existed on the planet previously. By 2000, Grove estimates, the PC industry will be shipping 100 million Pentium-style microprocessors a year. I think he’s wrong: he’ll be shipping 500 million.'”
Biography:Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab and a popular speaker and writer about technologies of the future, wrote one of the 1990s’ best-selling books about the new future of communications, “Being Digital.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Number of Users
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Being Nicholas: Nicholas Negroponte is the Most Wired Man We Know (and That’s Saying Something)
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/nicholas_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney