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vannevar

   foredoomed engineering concept, esp. one that fails by implicitly
   assuming that technologies develop linearly, incrementally, and in
   isolation from one another when in fact the learning curve tends to
   be highly nonlinear, revolutions are common, and competition is the
   rule.  The prototype was Vannevar Bush's prediction of
   `electronic brains' the size of the Empire State Building with a
   Niagara-Falls-equivalent cooling system for their tubes and relays,
   a prediction made at a time when the semiconductor effect had
   already been demonstrated.  Other famous vannevars have included
   magnetic-bubble memory, LISP machines, videotex, and a paper
   from the late 1970s that computed a purported ultimate limit on
   areal density for ICs that was in fact less than the routine
   densities of 5 years later.