Lot's of good stuff here, but I'll admit I can't remember a single "prediction" of my own. I just thought everything would keep going in the same direction, fa

Lot's of good stuff here, but I'll admit I can't remember a single "prediction" of my own. I just thought everything would keep going in the same direction, faster CPUs, faster network, cheaper disk and RAM, more e-commerce and more information exchange were the expectations I can recall. While we're reminiscing, the thing I remember the most from the late 90's is that it seemed no one knew what they were doing (or perhaps it was just me). The Internet opened up such a frontier in computing, for effectively hobbyists, as I guess we'll never see again. Perhaps that's why I don't recall thinking about what computing would look like in the 21st century--there was too much to be done right in front of my face! EDIT: There's a mention or two of thin clients. I think only Sun thought that would work :). Oh ok, I can think of one that actually worked out: Linux on commodity hardware in data centers. It became clear by 98 or so that the combination of Apache (httpd) on a bunch of cheap Linux boxen behind an expensive LB would tear down the Sun/IBM scale up model fairly easily due to both cost reduction and an improved resiliency. Of course there were MySQL bottlenecks to work through, but then memcache landed and pushed that off a cycle. Then there were the 64-bit AMD chips and a large bump in RAM density that pushed it back another. And then I guess true distributed computing landed.