There's no bigger fool than a fool that predicts the future ...

We are absolutely confident 25 megs is going to be enough - more than enough - for the average household.
Tony Abbott

(Above: the pond's love affair with David Pope continues apace. More Pope here).

Sorry for that Pope-ish interruption. Now where were we?

We are absolutely confident 25 megs is going to be enough - more than enough - for the average household.

Tony Abbott

Uh huh. Do carry on:

640 kilobytes of usable RAM ought to be enough for anybody.
Bill Gates
I didn't say that.
Bill Gates
I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
Bill Gates (wikiquotes)
I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within—oh five or six years people were complaining.
Bill Gates, 1993, ibid.
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
Ken Olsen
That's not what I really meant, read my wiki.
Ken Olsen hopes you will, here.
it is very possible that ... one machine would suffice to solve all the problems that are demanded of it from the whole country.
Sir Charles Darwin (no, not that one, the grandson, here)

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing or bicycling.
Tony Abbott channeling Emo Phillips
Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.
Alan Bennett
The Internet? We are not interested in it ... I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least ten years.
Bill Gates
I didn't say that.
Bill Gates
Two years from now, spam will be solved.
Bill Gates 2004
I didn't say that.
Bill Gates
The problem of viruses is temporary and will be solved in two years
John McAfee 1988
Computer viruses are an urban legend
Peter Norton, 1988
We didn't say that.
John McAfee, Peter Norton. (McAfee - I didn't do that)
I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.
CA Hoare, 1982
In the future, computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tonnes.
Popular Mechanics, 1949
We didn't say that.
Popular Mechanics
Where a calculator like ENIAC today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1½ tons
Popular Mechanics (here)

Software is like entropy: it is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.
Norman Augustine
Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.
Nathan Myhrvold
Pete: Oh definitely I'm surprised it hasn't happened earlier. It's been remarkable. The internet is about five thousand days old, about 13 years old and it hasn't broken down once in that time, so it's probably the most perfect machine we've built as humans. The thing is that when we built it, it was never meant to cope with what's happening now, and it was never meant to grow as rapidly as it has, and with video down there, going down the internet and so much entertainment, social networking, it's just at capacity, virtually at capacity now.
Oh the glory days. Read more here. Yes, that's where the pond's favourite saying, the full to overflowing intertubes came from ...
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Alan Kay

A white elephant on a massive scale ... demolish the NBN big Mal (here)

Tony Abbott

I didn't say that ... what I said was to build it cheaper and slower, using copper. What was good enough for Queen Victoria's transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858 will be good enough for 2050
Tony Abbott
I didn't say that.
Tony Abbott

Indeed. Let's remember what he actually said:

We are absolutely confident 25 megs is going to be enough - more than enough - for the average household.

Tony Abbott

Any bets on what he'll be saying in 2020?

I didn't say that.

Tony Abbott

Yep, and John Howard didn't go to war on the basis of a big, fat, juicy lie ...

Oh okay, you get the drift. It's already an old meme but the pond felt like a little fun.

A tidy 101 great computer quotes can be found here.

There's no bigger fool than those who make predictions about the future, which is - pardon while the pond second guesses a little here - another way of saying there's no bigger fool Tony Abbott.

Oh David, David, you must stop this, you're tearing the pond apart with your cartoon antics. There could be an apocalypse of laughter ... unless it's coming to the pond via HFC: