At least that’s what Clifford Stoll thought in this 1995 column he penned for Newsweek. Among the many things Stoll was sure would never catch on:

• Online newspapers
• eBooks
• eCommerce
• Restaurant reservations
• Chat
• Online dating

To be fair to Stoll, he didn’t have Google. We forget how amazing search engines are and how critical they are to making everything else online work. He’s Stoll’s primary reason for being so pessimistic about the Web:

“Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them-one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question”

Predicting is a dangerous business; especially nowadays when the never-amount-to-anything Web remembers everything you write.