Found a 1999 article saying the internet would collapse by 2005 due to too many users

I was cleaning out my dad's old hard drive and stumbled on a PDF from some tech magazine predicting global network failure within 6 years if broadband adoption kept growing. We're out here streaming 4K cat videos in 2025, guess that prediction aged like milk. Anyone else find old tech doomsday predictions that make you laugh?

2 comments

2 Comments

grace56510d ago

People actually found the original article and the author predicted a 47% failure rate by 2005. 47%! That's like saying almost half the internet would just go dark, like flipping a switch and poof, no more email or web pages. Wild to think someone sat there and calculated a specific percentage of doom based on some math that totally missed the boat. I bet that guy is still out there somewhere writing predictions about how cloud computing is gonna crash next Tuesday.

johnson.adam10d ago

People act like old tech predictions are hilarious but half the time they were just seeing real problems that got solved. That Y2K thing was supposed to meltdown everything and we just patched stuff last minute. Maybe the internet was actually choking in 2005 and companies just threw money at servers and fiber to bail us out. I still drop signal in my basement so it's not like infrastructure is perfect now. Those old writers were just looking at trends without guessing we'd invent compression algorithms and better routing. Not as dumb as people make it sound, just incomplete data.