Before that, he had predicted people would never use laptops on airplanes because the Federal Aviation Administration would ban the devices. (Although reporters eventually raised questions about the safety of carry-on laptops, the FAA never banned them.)

Then there was the time, in 1984, when he a wrote a piece decrying windows as a misguided fad. (Windows, in this case, meaning the kind used to display multiple programs running on the same computer at once.) “In the somewhat pretentious pep talk of the software industry, windowing was to emulate the familiar, comforting desktop, a cluttered one at that,” he wrote. “But it is extremely difficult to use efficiently a system that displays bits and pieces of documents in windows next to and above and below each other, like so many papers spread out in overlapping piles on a desk with just their edges sticking out here and there to identify them. So little was visible of each document, so few identifying lines, that the user often simply forgot what was hidden underneath.”

He also dismissed email no better than snail mail. “When all is said and done, electronic mail is no more efficient, in the vast majority of cases, than the telephone or the postal service it is supposed to replace,” he wrote in 1985. (He also criticized email’s decentralized infrastructure, which is widely heralded as perhaps its greatest feature today.)

In 1987, he insisted that personal computers would not be the “linchpins of the paperless office,” as many suggested. And he wrote more than one diatribe against computer graphics as going nowhere. (“Frankly, I find the prettiest picture a business can present is an attractive bottom line on the accountant's statement—in plain black and white,” he wrote in 1985.) That included the idea that Print Shop, the letterhead- and sign-making program, would never take off. Instead, it went on to become one of the best-selling pieces of software in the United States for more than 100 weeks, a fact Sandberg-Diment pointed out in a subsequent column.

In fact, Sandberg-Diment was acutely aware of the perils of prognostication, and he acknowledged as much repeatedly in his columns over the years. “[W]e know from past ‘futures’ that reality, when it arrives, rarely concurs with prediction,” he wrote in 1982.

When I reached Sandberg-Diment by phone this week to ask if he’d be willing to reflect on some of his past perspectives on technology, his first reaction was to let out a hearty laugh.

“So I was wrong about laptops,” he said, then paused for a moment.

“But I turned out to be right. I hate to put my foot in it again, but the laptop is at the bottom part of the curve,” he said, referring to the rise of smartphones.

The thing is, he really wasn’t wrong all the time—far from it, actually. When Sandberg-Diment said laptops would never leave niche markets, the machines could cost upward of $7,000 and the lightest-weight models clocked in at over 18 pounds. His annoyance with windows wasn’t off-base either. It’s still possible to display multiple windows at once, but many people prefer to minimize programs not in use, or toggle between tabs.