Looking forward

Turning a transistor on/off - number of electrons:

1997: 10³

2010: 8-9

2020: < 1

We already have DNA based computing, the beginning of Quantum Computing, ...

50 years: Auxiliary brain

a single chip storing 2x10¹⁶bits of data, ~storage capacity of 10⁵ human brains.

volume of 1 cubic centimeter, about the size of a sugar cube.
with power of 500 million Pentium Pros
able to record life's experiences and replay them

"We should not be shy about our predictions." [5]

-- Joel Birnbaum, Senior VP R&D and Director of HP Labs

[5] from ACM'97:The Next 50 Years of Computing (http://www.acm.org/acm97/home.html) and http://www.research.microsoft.com/acm97/