This opening address to the Conference points out that although progress in electronics since the end of World War II has been spectacular, its performance might have been even more impressive if a larger proportion of all the prophecies which were made of new devices, techniques, materials and functions had come to pass. Some of these hoped for developments are discussed and the reasons for their unfulfilled promise suggested.Lessons learned from this study of the past include the importance of both technical timeliness and commercial timeliness and can be applied to present-day forecasts of probable developments. Guide-lines for the future include the digital concept rather than the analogue, parallelism rather than serialism; and the importance of achieving function without the limitations of circuits.