Today you can still find a few folks with that same level of certainty, but not nearly as many and they're usually not nearly as rich. Some of them were flat wrong. Some of them were so silly that the only comparison I can think of is the South Sea Bubble in 17th-century England. However, they made the classic mistake of assuming the technology would be deployed much more rapidly than it would be and got crunched by the timing. Some people find all this scary.
Some people find it exhilarating.
But however you find it, it's the way things are and the way they're probably going to be for some time to come. We can adapt to it, we can fight it, or we can try to ignore it. Rick Cook has been writing about computers and high technology for more than 15 years. He learned Fortran on an IBM 1620 before becoming a newsman. He is the author of seven science fiction and fantasy novels.