“The Internet Is Dead” read a headline from 10 years ago.

It wasn’t a satire; it was a serious comment reflecting the considered opinions of a couple of telecoms chief executives at a New York seminar. This was 1997 and the reason I found it was that I was trawling through that period of history to find comments about the impending Y2K “disaster”.

This year, I was offered access to a major conference, headed by the chairman of a major European telco, with the opportunity to interview this luminary. Of course, I turned down the invite flat. We’re celebrity obsessed as a society, but the belief that comms companies can see into the future is, I think, finally being exorcised from corporate religion.

The death of the internet was actually taken for granted by the “bricks and mortar” pundits of course, and dot-com collapses four years later were seen as proof that it happened.

Futurology is a testing profession but it’s the certainties that were offered back then that seem so absurd a decade on. I did my bit in repeating some of those but at least I didn’t predict that Java would be eliminated by Windows NT, as some enthusiastic colleagues foretold.

I think I’ll stick to nostalgia, it’s much more accurate...