It is a comment that will forever haunt dear Mr Watson because, as we now know, as far as prognostications go, it could scarcely have been more wrong.

To be fair to Mr Watson, his proclamation was made at a time when computers were extraordinarily large and their processing power extraordinarily small.

In fact, it would have been far more remarkable if he had actually accurately predicted the explosion of the computer age that was to come.

If Mr Watson had declared in 1943 that by 2015 about 85 per cent of western households would own a computer, his sanity would have been brought into question.

And he would have been sent straight for psychiatric assessment had he somehow managed to predict that within 70 years some two billion people around the world would own smartphones.

No one could have foreseen the enormous advances that were to sweep the globe in such a short period of time. Even the great technological visionaries, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, can only forecast a few years forward with any confidence.

Technology has moved and continues to move so quickly that it is conceivable even the iPhone – the standard-bearer for modern-day technological advancement – could be rendered obsolete in a few short years.

It is the gains in telecommunications technology that has made all this possible. Not exclusively, but in no small part.

Twenty years ago, desktop computers in homes around Australia were connected to the internet via dial up.

It mattered not that it took several minutes to load a website, or an hour to download a song, or a day to download a movie.

Now, through the advent of broadband and wi-fi, these tasks can be completed almost instantaneously on devices that fit snugly in the palm of your hand.

Except, it seems, if you live in parts of Bendigo. Slow and unreliable internet is not a “first world problem” as some would say. Rather, it is a major barrier to the city’s growth and productivity that must be fixed.

The NBN is billed by the Coalition as the tool that will keep Australia competitive in the global economy. Although it has its critics, for locals stuck with 1990s dial up internet speeds, it cannot come soon enough.