L. Gordon Crovitz's "Rule of Law" column from the 1980s-1990s Wall Street Journal is one of my all time favorites but since he returned to writing in the Murdoch era, his "Information Age" column is less inspirational.
Today's column includes a recycled list of comically bad predictions about technology that are meant to reinforce the idea that predicting the course of invention itself is a fool's errand.
That may be true but the quotes he used have almost all been debunked by researchers, including Bill Gates claiming that 640 KB is a good size for a hard drive and a patent officer in 1899 declaring that everything useful had already been invented. Columnists love these quotes, which is why they never check them, but it took me about 15 minutes of Googling to find citations refuting most of them.
Big time Wall Street Journal columnists shouldn't repeat urban legends.
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