For years, I lived with the illusion that I could do no wrong in my father's eyes. Then I turned a page, found a slip of paper, and in the process discovered that not only did my father know my weaknesses better than I did, he was also willing to share them with an audience of complete strangers.

Through much of the 1960s and 1970s, my father gave a standard marketing speech on the potential of computers to any audience that might include potential purchasers of new machines. He spoke to the Northwood Institute, the International Skilled Trades Convention, the International Association of Personnel Women, the Data Processors Management Association, the Illinois Business Education Conference, and the AFL-CIO. The outline changed little from speech to speech. Once there were only 12 computers in the world, the text began. A decade later, there were 10,000. A decade after that there were 50,000. The future looks bright because the computer will help us manage complexity.

To give the story some life, Dad discussed some of his personal experiences with the computer. He talked about accounting systems, airline reservations, and even a problem with a credit card bill: He was accidentally billed for a charge by someone who lived in the same city, shared the same last name, and had a credit card number that differed from his by only one digit. While many people would have taken this last incident as evidence of the problems that computers can create, Dad saw in it a blessing. The bill was corrected in only three months time, and his credit rating was unaffected.

When I was reading the text of this speech, all went well until I suddenly appeared on page 8. Dad was discussing how it had become commonplace to blame computers for every problem. "Even my 12-year-old son has learned this," he said. "When report card time came around last spring, and he failed to bring one home, he explained that the computer had made a mistake and they were all late. But it turned out to be another problem, and he was only buying some time."

I have wondered if he paused at this point, interrupted by a gentle round of shared laughter from the parents in the room. If they did and I had known about it, my humiliation would have been complete. At the time, I was suffering from those problems that only a child on the verge of the teenage years can appreciate: dislike of a new school, discomfort with a new group of peers, and frustration with academic work that had once been so easy.

Fortunately, Dad did not end his speech with the reference to me but quickly moved to the main theme of his talk, which was the role of human leadership in the "intelligent, constructive, and beneficial application of the computer technology to the many problems demanding solution." Though I hope that his audience grasped the lesson that the speech offered, I suspect that they missed the bigger point: Every vision of the future is just another story of the present.

From the inception of the field, computer scientists have loved projecting visions of the future. In story after story, the early leaders of the field argued that the computer would make us both rich and wise. In the best of circumstances, it would also suppress wars and give us better weather.

My father, the son of a small town merchant, claimed that the computer would moderate the business cycle by giving business people better control over their inventories and easier access to distant markets. Ultimately, he hoped that the new machine would eliminate economic depressions such as the one that nearly bankrupted his father's lumberyard. Many times he also argued that the computer was the best thing to come out of World War II, a conflict that consumed three years of his life, took away his beloved brother, and introduced the atomic bomb.

Ida Rhodes, an employee at the National Bureau of Standards, provided my favorite early vision of the computer's future. Between 1948 and 1954, the bureau's Computing Machine Laboratory was one of the two or three major computing labs in the world. Bureau personnel tested new circuit elements, experimented with new storage devices, and developed new programming techniques. Rhodes was a programmer before the concept of programmer was well defined. Loud, brash, and funny, Rhodes was a native of the Ukraine, where she had been trained as a mathematician. When the turmoil of the Russian Revolution reached Kiev, she emigrated to Brooklyn.

There, the cold grasp of the Great Depression smothered Rhodes's hopes for peace and prosperity. She survived the bad times with the help of the Works Progress Administration, a work-relief agency, and performed war service in the Mathematical Tables Project, the leading computing lab of the time.

The project's offices consisted of a massive room filled with row upon row of tables. Employees sat shoulder to shoulder as they did computations on printed worksheets, scribbling away until their hands hurt. When the National Bureau of Standards asked her to join its machine development laboratory, Rhodes grabbed the offer and moved into the new Computing Machine Laboratory as a programmer.

With such a personal history, it is not too surprising that Rhodes would describe the computer's future in terms of corner offices. In her mind, programmers would be the intellectual leaders of the 21st century, and hence would be given large, sunny offices where they could relax "between periods of intense mental work." She predicted that companies would find "that the saving effected by the use of electronic equipment [would be] sufficient to allow them to install their human staff in luxurious surroundings" and at the same time would allow them to "raise their stock dividends." In her future, there would be no shared desks, no cramped quarters, no office cubicles.

Rhodes spoke of her vision for the future at a conference of the Institute of Radio Engineers in the spring of 1952. At that time, the Computing Machine Laboratory was at the height of its powers. It had helped guide the construction of three computers: the Univac I, the SEAC, and the SWAC. Each of these machines had recently begun operation and each was starting to give bureau researchers important experience with digital computation.

As she talked to the assembled engineers, Rhodes told of a future, less than 50 years away, when computers would be small, roughly the size of a portable typewriter, and would sit on desks. These computers would have cathode ray screens and keyboards. They would be connected to a data network that would allow them to share information and access servers, some located at the bottom of mine shafts, others housed in submarines.

She concluded her vision by discussing how people would use their computers at home and described a place that could easily be mistaken for Bill Gates's mansion on the shores of Lake Washington. The walls of this home were covered with video screens, which the residents could use to communicate with other homes, contact businesses, display art, or show off the special treasures of the household, which included an example from her own hobby, a collection of rare orchids.

As Rhodes talked that morning, she described her vision as a "dream," a picture in a crystal ball. In fact, she had no special insight into the future. Her dream was really a collage or conglomeration of ideas that had been circulating in that early community of computer researchers. None of them can be attributed to her.

The miniature computers came from researchers at the Bureau of Standards who were working to shrink the size of electronic components. The cathode ray tube came from MIT. The transmission of data over telephone lines had originated a decade before at Bell Telephone Laboratories. All these ideas, except for the corner office, the mine shaft, the submarine, and the rare orchids, had been summarized in documents written by Sam Alexander, a scientist at the Bureau of Standards.

In fact, Rhodes was not describing the future but 1952, a year in which the computer had brought her a good job, a nice clean office, a sunny apartment, and a lovely collection of orchids. However, this life was far from secure. In a little more than two years, the Computing Machine Laboratory would close, and the National Bureau of Standards would cease to be a major source of innovation for the computing industry.

The Computing Machine Laboratory's demise coincided with several themes: the return of conservatives to national power in the US, the rise of the computer industry, a backlash against scientists who had served in World War II, and the expansion of computer research at US universities.

In the spring of 1953, the newly elected Eisenhower Administration demanded, in a somewhat awkward fashion, a complete review of the National Bureau of Standards. At the review's end, the final report recommended terminating most research that private entities could perform, including the work done by the Computing Machine Laboratory. By the summer of 1954, Rhodes had left computer development and returned to mathematical work.

The wind blows where it will, and it kicks up enough dust so that we cannot tell whence we are coming and whither we are going. Every researcher, every laboratory has been able to hold the center of attention for only a short period.

For a time, the National Bureau of Standards commanded the future of computer science. So did the Glider Factory, the facility that belonged to Engineering Research Associates in St. Paul, Minnesota. Wallace J. Eckert once led IBM's research from a laboratory at Columbia University, and Howard Aiken trained influential graduate students at Harvard. Burroughs once had a research facility in Paoli, Pennsylvania, while Digital Equipment had its laboratory at Maynard, Massachusetts. All are gone. Even the mighty Bell Laboratories and Xerox Parc had only brief terms as the leaders of computing research.

If our former visions of the future are about avoiding economic depression, redeeming a war, or finding honesty in the mind of a 12-year-old boy, what do our current visions of the years to come tell us about the present? Why do we want to view the computer as a utility? Why do we foresee digital communications as universal and seamless? Why do we expect every aspect of our lives to be digitized? Why do we accept the idea that we will someday spend every waking moment of our lives in front of a computer screen?

On a recent trip, I spent an extended period waiting in an airport lounge for a delayed plane. Across from me sat two groups of young women. One group spoke in staccato French about their new cell phones, ring tones they were exchanging across some sort of wireless connection, and pictures they had just received from their boyfriends. The other group, which consisted of three or four women in long, dark traditional dresses, talked quietly among themselves or sat silently. One member of this group kept casting a sideways glance at the women with cell phones, a glance that seemed at once to be curious about the new technology and wary of it.

Each of these two groups of women would craft a different vision of the future. Those of us who have helped to shape and guide modern digital technology would write a third vision. As we have seen computers and digital communication extend our capacities and enrich our lives, we would only expect that this technology would expand both its scale and scope.

Ida Rhodes began describing her vision of the future by stating, "I doubt whether even the most fertile imagination possessed by a mathematician a short century ago could have foreseen the wondrous features of our high-speed electronic computer." Yet, she not only failed to see the forces that would curtail computer research at the National Bureau of Standards, she also misinterpreted several key trends in the actual technologies of computing.

My father did not foresee the end of the mainframe as the dominant force in computing. He spent his retirement trying to master a personal computer that he viewed as unsophisticated, a task that required many phone calls to a son who had once been 12 years old.

I fully expect that my vision of the future will be thoroughly undercut, if it has not been so already. I have placed my faith in a certain set of technology to lead me into the coming decades, to be my guide and comfort and entertainer. At some point, I'm sure that I will find that my faith is ill placed, that the future is taking an unexpected direction, all because my vision, no matter how much it has been enhanced by digital technology, is not big enough to let me see all the forces that are shaping this world.

David Alan Grier is the editor in chief, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and the author of When Computers Were Human (Princeton University Press, 2005). Grier is an associate professor in the Center for International Science and Technology Policy at the George Washington University. Contact him at grier@gwu.edu.