That expectation seemed so natural back then that nobody really talked about it much. It wasn't a radical prediction theory, like the paperless office (nope) or

That expectation seemed so natural back then that nobody really talked about it much. It wasn't a radical prediction theory, like the paperless office (nope) or global warming (ouch), it was an everyday observation: young people, if they had access to computers, were universally way ahead of older people with access to computers. It was am absolute no-brainer to extrapolate from this that all young people would become super fluent at computing once they all had access. It would have been a radical prediction to expect that this would not happen, like it did (due to ever-increasing simplifications). But nobody made that prediction, at least not in a notable way. People are generally very bad at predicting stagnation or even a reversal of trends. If you asked anyone to describe a 2020 communications device in early 2000, when cellphones had just recently evolved from bricks to the miniscule 8210, the prediction would have been a device the size of a keychain fob, not the pocket TVs we actually have.