Famous Last Words.....

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
          --Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
          --Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science,1949

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the
best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't
last out the year."
          --The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

"But what ... is it good for?"
          --Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968,
            commenting on the microchip.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
          --Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment
            Corp., 1977

"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built
with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us?  Or we'll
give it to you.  We just want to do it.  Pay our salary, we'll come work for
you.'
And they said, 'No.'  So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said,
'Hey, we don't need you.  You haven't got through college yet.'"
          --Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari
         and  H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
          --Bill Gates, 1981

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a
means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
          --Western Union internal memo, 1876.

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for
a message sent to nobody in particular?"
          --David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for
            investment in the radio in the 1920s.

"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than
a 'C,' the idea must be feasible."
          --A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's
            paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on
            to found Federal Express Corp.)

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
          --H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary
Cooper."
          --Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone
            With The Wind."

"A cookie store is a bad idea.  Besides, the market research reports say
America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make."
          --Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies.

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
          --Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
          --Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The
literature was full of examples that said you can't do this."
          --Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M
            "Post-It" Notepads.

   As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest
parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a
practicable and therefore promising device.  It is when one considers the
multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt...
for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its
flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the
charges it then might have left.
   Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing of
the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to
re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against
which to react...  Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out 
daily in High Schools.
          --1921 New York Times editorial 

"You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of
your muscles?  It can't be done.  It's just a fact of life.  You just have to
accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight
training."
          --Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by
            inventing Nautilus.

"Drill for oil?  You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil?  You're
crazy."
          --Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill
            for oil in 1859.

"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
          --Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
          --Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure
            de Guerre.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
          --Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction".
          --Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the
intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon".
          --Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed
            Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.
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