IP: Re: [Fwd: Bill Gates Makes Predictions]

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Sun, 19 Nov 1995 14:12:49 -0500
To: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
From: rjs () rpcp mit edu (Richard Jay Solomon)




>        ``There will be a day, not far distant, when you will be able to
> conduct business, study, explore the world and its cultures, call
> up any great entertainment, make friends and show pictures to
> distant relatives -- without leaving your desk or armchair,'' Gates,
> the billionaire chairman of Microsoft Corp., wrote.


        "Railroads ... would render life more valuable 'by diminishing the
stock of human misery.' "
-- New York State Commission on Internal Improvements, 1836.


       The railroad "induces men to spend their evenings ... at home in the
bosoms of their families, where they are secure from vicious examples and
allurements...
       "Indeed, [the railroad] will do much towards the suppression of war
in general.... What hostile force will dare to approach such a moral
volcano, whose slumbering fires the first breath of war would awaken to
fierce and desolating action! With the expedition of magic, the whole
embodied prowness and power, and all the military enginery of the national
might be brought to bear on any single piot, to discomfit and destroy an
approaching enemy."
-- a railroad promoter in 1831.


       "Railroads are to civilization what mathematics were to the mind,...
their immense promise made the whole world nervous with hope & fear....
[Nevertheless] the man gets out of a railroad car at the end of 500 miles
in every respect the same as he got in."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1847.


      "...residential telephone service ... [saves] time, labor, drudgery,
and [makes] the whole household run more smoothly. It is always on duty,
shops in all weather, corrects mistakes, and hastens deliveries. It saves
letter writing, orders the dinner, invites the guests, reserves the
tickets, and calls the carriage. It makes appointments, changes the time,
cancels them altogether and renews them. It calls the expressman, calls the
cab, and instructs the office. It invites one's friends, asks them to stay
away, asks them to hurry and enables them to invite in return ...."
-- 1904 handbook for Telephone company solitictors.


     "The Modern Way is to save one's time and temper by telephoning.
Housekeeping is such a simple matter when all the ordering is done over the
wires. A morning's tiresome shopping can be done in ten minutes, in the
comfort of one's own boudoir. There is so much time left for pleasure and
recreation and things that are worth while."
-- 1905 advert from the Delaware and Atlantic Telegraph and Telephone Co.


     "Some day we will build up a world telephone system making necessary
to all peoples the use of a common language,... which will join all the
people of the earth into one brotherhood...."
-- General J. J. Carty, chief engineer of AT&T, on the inauguration of the
first trans-continental telephone line in 1915.


       "It seems to us that we are getting perilously near the ideal of the
modern Utopian when life is to consist of sitting in armchairs and pressing
a button. It is not a desirable prospect; we shall have no wants, no money,
no ambition, no youth, no desires, no individuality, no names and nothing
wise about us."
-- The Electrician, 1891.


So, what's new?


Richard
















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