| Historic quotes |
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They call it (television) a medium because nothing's well done
| Goodman Ace (to Groucho Marx), 1953 |
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"Atomic energy might be as good as our present day explosives, but it is unlikely to produce anything very much more dangerous."
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"The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who looks for a source of power in the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine. "
| Sir Ernest Rutherford, 1933 |
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"I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogma."
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"This extraordinary monument of theoretical genius accordingly remains, and doubtless will for ever remain, a theoretical possibility."
| Biographer of Charles Babbage, 1871 |
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"Comets are not heavenly bodies, but originate in the earth's atmosphere below the moon."
| Fr. Augustion de Angelis of the Clementine College, Rome, 1673 |
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"The proposition, that the sun is the centre and does not revolve about the earth, is foolish, absurd, false in theology and heretical."
| The Inquisition, on Galileo's proposals |
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"By the end of the decade multi-channel cable television will be commonplace in-home countrywide - TV will be used for armchair shopping, banking, calling emergency services and many other services"
| Kenneth Baker, Minister for Information & Technology, UK, 1982 |
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"I have lived through several periods of development in the fields of communication and entertainment. I remember the day when wireless as a service of transoceanic communication was regarded by some as a joke. Those who owned cables could not see wireless as a competitor of cables. Who would entrust important messages to a medium that was filled with static? I lived through the day when the Victor Talking Machine Company could not understand how people would sit at home and listen to music that someone else decided they should hear. And so they felt that the ‘radio music box’ and radio broadcasting were a toy and would be a fancy. I saw the same thing happen in the field of talking motion pictures. It was urged by many that people would not go to a movie that made a lot of noise and bellowed through an amplifier and disturbed the slumber of those who enjoyed the silent movie…and then – in 1927 – came Warner Brothers with ‘The Jazz Singer’ and Al Jolson. Almost overnight a new industry was born. Today, who goes to a silent movie? Let me assure you, my friends, after more than forty years of experience in this field of communications and entertainment, I have never seen any protection in merely standing still. There is no protection except through progress. Therefore, may I leave you with this final thought: I would suggest that you reflect carefully and thoughtfully upon the possible ultimate effects of television upon your established business if you do nothing, and of the great opportunities for your present and future businesses if you do the right thing!"
| David Sarnoff, President, NBC, 1947 |
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"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarised with the ideas from the beginning."
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"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible."
| Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, London, 1895 |
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"We don't like their sound [the Beatles], and guitar music is on the way out."
| Decca Recordings Co., 1962 |
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"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
| H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927 |
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"The wireless music box has no imaginable value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
| David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s |
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"I have in mind a plan of development which would make radio a household utility. The idea is to bring music into the home by wireless. The receiver can be designed in the form of a simple ‘radio music box’, and arranged for several different wave lengths which should be changeable with the throwing of a simple switch or the pressing of a single button. The same principle can be extended to numerous other fields, as for example, receiving lectures at home which would be perfectly audible. Also, events of national importance can be simultaneously announced and received. Baseball scores can be transmitted in the air. This proposition would be especially interesting to farmers and others living in outlying districts."
| David Sarnoff, American Marconi, 1916 |
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"Don't talk with your ear or listen with your mouth."
| Rochester Telephone Exchange Directory, USA, 1879 |
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"The telephone has become an actual business necessity."
| The Union and Advertiser newspaper, Rochester, USA, 1886 |
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"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."
| Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1876 |
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"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons."
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"We offer the the business men of Rochester an absolutely perfect system of speaking communication with each other, by which the utmost secrecy is assured. The advantages of such a system in the saving of time and labor, and the expedition of business, are obvious."
| Edward Hall, Rochester Telephone Exchange, USA, 1879 (3 years after the invention of the telephone) |
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"The average American family hasn't time for television."
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"Television in the home is now technically feasible. The difficulties confronting this difficult and complicated art can only be solved from operating experience, actually serving the public in their homes."
| David Sarnoff, RCA, October 1938 |
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"Automobiles will start to decline almost as soon as the last shot is fired in World War II. The name of Igor Sikorsky will be as well known as Henry Ford's, for his helicopter will all but replace the horseless carriage as the new means of popular transportation. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter.... These 'copters' will be so safe and will cost so little to produce that small models will be made for teenage youngsters. These tiny 'copters, when school lets out, will fill the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads."
| Harry Bruno, aviation publicist, 1943 |
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"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
| Thomas Watson, Chairman, IBM, 1949 |
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"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
| Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 |
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"The electric light is very probably a great invention, and...let us take it for granted that its future development will be vast. But this, unhappily, cannot be urged as a reason why the pioneer companies should be prosperous."
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"The Internet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea - massive, difficult to re-direct, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
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"X-rays will prove to be a hoax."
| Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1890-5 |
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"Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of this device."
| C. P. Scott 1846-1932 (editor of the Manchester Guardian) |
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"Television won't last. It's a flash in the pan."
| Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948 |
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"Television won't matter in your lifetime or mine."
| Rex Lambert, The Listener, Editorial, 1936 |
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"The telegraph is a kind of very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and he is mewing in Los Angeles. Radio operates in exactly the same way, except there is no cat."
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"That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced. "
| Scientific American, Jan 2, 1909. |
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"Radio has no future."
| Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1897 |
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"[Edison's Lamp] ... good enough for our transatlantic friends ... but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men."
| British Parliamentary Committee, 1878 |
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"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
| Western Union internal memo, 1876 |
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"The idea that cavalry will be replaced by these iron coaches is absurd. It is little short of treasonous."
| ADC to Field Marshal Haig, at tank demonstration, 1916 |
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"All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint."
| Engineering Editor, The Times, 1906 |
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"Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible."
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"Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia."
| Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London |
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"The dangers are obvious. Stores of gasoline in the hands of people interested primarily in profit would constitute a fire and explosive hazard of the first rank. Horseless carriages propelled by gasoline might attain speeds of 14 or even 20 miles per hour. The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action even if the military and economic implications were not so overwhelming... [T]he cost of producing [gasoline] is far beyond the financial capacity of private industry... In addition the development of this new power may displace the use of horses, which would wreck our agriculture."
| U. S. Congressional Record, 1875 |
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"There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom. The glib supposition of utilizing atomic energy when our coal has run out is a completely unscientific Utopian dream, a childish bug-a-boo."
| Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize physicist, 1928 |
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"There will never be a mass market for motor cars - about 1,000 in Europe - because that is the limit on the number of chauffeurs available!"
| Spokesman for Daimler Benz |
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"Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances."
| Dr. Lee De Forest (inventor of the vacuum tube), 1957 |
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"Everything that can be invented has been invented."*
| Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, 1899*This is a great example of how misleading it can be to quote out of context. At the time he said these words Charles Duell was requesting a funding increase because of the heavy load of patent applications. He argued that anyone who would deny him additional funding must believe that "everything that can be invented has been invented". |
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"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
| Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929 |
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"The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercized in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions."
| Dr. Samuel Johnson, in The Idler, 1759 |
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"Rock 'n' Roll is phony and false, and sung, written and played for the most part by cretinous goons."
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"Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union."
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"In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people who would shut up the human race upon this globe, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars with the same facility, rapidity and certainty as we now make the ocean voyage from Liverpool to New York."
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"It's a great invention but who would want to use it anyway?"
| President Rutherford B. Hayes after a demonstration of Bell's telephone |
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"Dear Mr. President: The canal system of this country is being threatened by a new form of transportation known as 'railroads' ... As you may well know, Mr. President, 'railroad' carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by 'engines' which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed."
| Martin Van Buren, Governor of New York |
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"DeForest has said . . . that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public ... has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company. "
| U. S. District Attorney, prosecuting inventor Lee Deforest for fraud, 1913 |
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"What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches? "
| The Quarterly Review, England, 1825 |
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"The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most."
| IBM to the founders of Xerox, 1959 |
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"There is not in sight any source of energy that would be a fair start toward that which would be necessary to get us beyond the gravitative control of the earth. "
| Forest Ray Moulton, astronomer, 1935 |
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"To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth--all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances. "
| Lee deForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, Feb 25, 1957. |
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"No one will pay good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can ride his horse there in one day for free."
| King William I of Prussia, 1864, on hearing of the invention of trains |
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"A man has been arrested in New York for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires so that it will be heard by the listener at the other end. He calls this instrument a telephone. Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires."
| News item in an 1868 New York paper |
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"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
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"Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean."
| Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London |
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"Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them."
| Dr. Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, USA, July 1945 (predicting the World Wide Web) |
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"Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value."
| Editorial in the Boston Post, 1865 |
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"I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions."
| Wilbur Wright (in a speech to the Aero Club of France), 1908 |
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"Man will not fly for 50 years."
| Wilbur Wright, aviation pioneer, 1901 (two years later his brother Orville made the first manned flight) |
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"There is no hope for the fanciful idea of reaching the moon because of insurmountable barriers to escaping the earth's gravity"
| Dr. F. R. Moulton, University of Chicago astronomer, 1932 |
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"Space travel is bunk."
| Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal, UK, 1957 (Sputnik orbited the earth two weeks later.) |
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"Space travel is utter bilge."
| Dr. Richard van der Reit Wooley, Astronomer Royal, UK space advisor to the government, 1956. (Sputnik orbited the earth the following year.) |
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"I think I may say without contradiction that when the Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it, and no more will be heard of it."
| Erasmus Wilson, Professor at Oxford University, 1878 |
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"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will."
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"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
| Darryl F. Zanuck, President, 20th Century Fox, 1946 |
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"The radio craze will die out in time."
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"The horse is here to stay, the automobile is only a fad."
| President of Michigan Savings Bank, advice to Horace Rackham, lawyer of Henry Ford, 1903 (Rackham ignored the advice and invested $5000 in Ford stock, selling it later for $12.5 million) |
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"Few things seem to lie farther beyond the ordinary human ken than computers. To most people the notion that computers can be understood and operated by anyone other than a scientific genius seems wildly improbable. Nevertheless, it is surprising how easily a reasonably intelligent mind can be taught how these machines work and how they are operated."
| The Times, UK, 4th August 1960 |
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"Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition."
| Dennis Gabor, "Inventing the Future", 1962 |
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"Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value."
| Editorial in the Boston Post, 1865 |
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"The PC remains a complex and expensive device, and it is feasible that in its present form it is only a phase that we are going through: it will never break the 50% barrier to become a mass consumer device. Even now in the United States internet penetration remains at less than a third."
| Paul Edwards, Chief Executive, The Henley Centre, UK, 1999 (In 2002 UK PC penetration rose to 53% of homes. In 2001 internet penetration in the USA rose to 54% of households) |
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"Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it has therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquences sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic. Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement."
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"I do not believe television will come to stay until the picture shown is sufficiently larger, cleaner and more detailed to permit a family of five to see what is going on, without exerting any great amount of effort on their part."
| L. Waters Milbourne, WCAO Baltimore, US, 1944 |
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"By 1990, the [television] cable will touch all parts of human life: it will allow students to attend school three days a week, letting them learn at home on the other days over two-way TV."
| Marvin Cetron and Thomas O'Toole, Encounters with the Future, 1982 |
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"Paper will be replaced by material which does not depend upon the slow growth of trees for its production."
| Norman Bel Geddes, Ten Years From Now, Ladies Home Journal, 1931 |
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"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."
| Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926 |
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"What use could this company make of an electrical toy?"
| The President of Western Union responding to Alexander Graham Bell's offer to Western Union of the exclusive rights to the telephone for $100,000 in 1876 |
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"I watched his countenance closely, to see if he was not deranged and I was assured by other Senators after we left the room that they had no confidence in it."
| Senator Smith of Indiana, on witnessing a telegraph demonstration by Samuel Morse, 1842 |
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