Futurologists always think of what is technically feasible, rarely of what is economically feasible. Economic miracles like silicon valley happen once a century. The rest of the time we're just expanding the legacy.
The "optoelectronic" thing must have been a pretty brief phase in imagineering in the computer industry. I vaguely recall it, but I don't think it was around for long as the "this is where we're going next" idea, was it?
Obviously holographic memory and storage has disappointed us, as well, but I think flash memory has more than made up for it. I was just thinking today how cool and outlandish it would have been ten years ago to have 16GB stored in something about the size and thickness of a dime (Micro SD). Full-sized hard disks back then were in the 40 to 80 GB range, and I don't recall flash drives existing at all.
I thought it was amusing that they predicted terabyte hard disks using holography, but we got there with the same basic technology (magnetism) we were using back then.
A couple of Google searches reveals that IBM introduced a 16.8GB drive in 1997, and the 137GB ATA limitation was broken in 2002. I don't think I'm off by an order of magnitude, and it looks like 4-8GB was the 1997-ish era desktop disk size.
Which shows that drives in the 40-80GB range were being sold in both 1998 and 1999, but the bulk of revenues was in the 5-10 and the 10-20 GB range. So, there were definitely 40GB drives in 1999, but I'll concede that based on those sales numbers the average new desktop in 1999 would have probably had a ~10GB drive. So, I'm not quite off by an order of magnitude, but my memory was a couple of years off.
10 years seems to be the standard prediction timeframe. The cure for various diseases is always 10 years away, a replacement for oil is always 10 years away, etc.
10 years seems like a long time, but its not. It's certainly not a long time in research fields. And it's usually not long enough to take a new idea to fruition.
