They did not foresee the impact and rise of the personal computer and they didn't foresee client/server computing.
The Menlo Park lab also gained renown for counting, among its researchers, Silicon Valley legend Doug Engelbart, who in the 1960s pioneered the computer mouse and foresaw many of the basic computing tools we now take for granted.
But as well as having foreseen the future of computing, over his career Dr Gelernter has developed a clear understanding of humans' conflicted relationship with the technology on which they increasingly rely.
Allen and Liddle's lab occupies several buildings on some of Silicon Valley's sweetest real estate, not far from the foothills on the western edge of Palo Alto... Yet in many respects Interval bears little resemblance to the PARC of the seventies....Interval's researchers foresee a world in which computing is ubiquitous and the purpose of it is no longer just to enhance productivity.
The second was at CloudSwitch (acquired by Verizon), where my co-founder and I foresaw the rise of hybrid cloud computing back in 2008 and built an offering to address the extremely complex networking, security and portability challenges with an easy-button approach.
Some scholars believe Otlet also foresaw something like the Semantic Web, the emerging framework for subject-centric computing that has been gaining traction among computer scientists like Mr. Berners-Lee.
While many of the projects playing with this idea are more conceptual or humorous than they are actual commercial products, it does foresee a future of so-called "passive computing" where attention is diverted away from these "glowing rectangles" and back to physical reality, where we're surrounded by "smart" objects with computing power embedded inside.
In some complex domains (e.g., ubiquitous computing, autonomic systems and context-aware computing), it is difficult to foresee all functionalities and variabilities a specific SPL may require.
As the world transforms with the automation of knowledge workers, mobility, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things, which include hyperconnecting sensors and devices, Mr. Ballabio foresees a transformation in the B2C web technology across a lot of verticals.
