"Regardless who was an expert in automation in the 60s, I'm pretty sure they weren't being asked". Very much so. In those days if you wanted to know about the

"Regardless who was an expert in automation in the 60s, I'm pretty sure they weren't being asked". Very much so. In those days if you wanted to know about the future of telecoms you asked telephone engineers. Those guys thought in terms of voice circuits, circuit switching, and paying for fixed bandwidth (e.g. 64kBit/sec) by the second whether you were using it or not. Even when packet switching came along they were still trying to shoehorn it into their existing technical and business model. There were people thinking about packet switched services, but they weren't "experts". Take a look at Vannavar Bush's paper "As We May Think". It anticipates concepts of hypertext, but the whole thing is shot through with solutioneering about microfilm.