I lived in University accomodation with a researcher who was working on transistors for optical computers, and predicted them taking over from silicon in "10 ye

I lived in University accomodation with a researcher who was working on transistors for optical computers, and predicted them taking over from silicon in "10 years, tops". That was in 1989. The relationship between funding and hype is always weird. But it must be really hard having to decide which of several projects to fund, and "what people are talking about" is obviously one of the metrics.