> Twenty years ago, in the infancy of the computer revolution, before problems began cropping up, the public was told that computers would be smarter than brains. Computer chess champions and machine translation, for example, were just around the corner. So far, neither has been accomplished successfully, and neither is likely to be any time soon.

The original predictions were merely off by 40 years.

Also, I like this 1977 article as it highlights that any overnight success is decades in the making.