My friend Travis sent me a scan of this article. It's a snippet of an article from an August 1968 write up in National Geographic. I don't know what the whole article was about (he only scanned this one page), but there were some very interesting notions back in the summer of 1968 about what computers will do for us. I was born in 1968, and it's amazing how almost all that future technology is sitting square in our laps today, cheap, and sometimes free.

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Computers May Do Household Chores

When these supercircuits and "computers on a slice" come out of a laboratory some years hence, the stuff of dreams will become reality. The computer, adaptable to an infinite number of tasks, will become remarkably cheap by today's standards. According to predictions given me by industry leaders....here's what it will do for you:

* In your car a computer no bigger than a teacup will control your ignition system and all the instruments on your dash. More important, it will continuously monitor radar signals that measure the distance to the next car. If the distance becomes too small or the rate of approach becomes too great for safety, an alarm will sound.

* In your home, a rented terminal liked to a master computer will virtually run your household. It will control the environment -- heating, cooling, humidity. It will control all your appliances, and radio, hi-fi, and television sets. If you are delayed on a shopping trip, you will be able to phone in and direct the computer to turn on the stove and start dinner. It will figure your income tax and at any moment tell you your balance at the bank.

* If you wish, you will even be able to have books in your city library reproduced on a screen in your home, page by page. The books, of course, will have been recorded on magnetic tape at the library. And your newspaper may one day roll out of a machine in your home, printing news fed into the computer, for a free, at the newspaper office.

* At the department store, the clerk will take your personal identification card, put it into a slot connected by computer to local banks, and the amount of the purchase will be transferred from your balance to the store's account. If your balance won't cover the purchase, the computer will say so. Checks will become obsolete for most purposes.

All this can become possible through large-scale integration.
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It all seems so elementary now that we read it, but in 1968, we only had color television for not even 15 years, and it wasn't that popular yet, as most television sets were still black and white (although the first experimental color broadcast dates back to 1928). So the idea of a debit card, being able to program your HVAC unit, having an eReader (like the Kindle, or Sony eReader) was so "space like", that we only dreamed about it. Today - it is hysterical to me because this was all predicted the year I was born. I've literally seen this technology slowly come to the forefront, be honed down, tweaked, remade and reinvented, and priced to where near everyone can have it if they wish. I also have to applaud mankind for dreaming big and thinking ahead, and someone actually making these things a reality, even as far fetched as they sounded to people in 1968.

As a side note: 1968 also saw 2001: A Space Odyssey released. That film set a standard in technology too. It showed Voice Print Identification (of which wasn't released as a prototype until 1977), a computer that played chess with you, personal in-flight entertainment displays, flat screen monitors, voice-controlled computer commands, computer teleconferencing, etc. Let's not forget that Star Trek's communicator which is the same as a flip phone today, and they also had teleconferencing, and a library computer with infinite things stored in it.

Very interesting

Based on this its probably safe to say that some of the current predictions for the future will definitely enter our reality

Yes, but...WHERE ARE THE FLYING CARS? THEY SAID WE'D HAVE FLYING CARS BY NOW!

RodeoSchro said:

Kevin Smith said he'd suck two dicks if someone were to offer him a flying car. He said, "Even if they just had one dick, I'd offer to suck two. 'That's worth two dicks to me, bring it on.'"

That stuff is available, yes, but I'd say only the last one is true for most people. Everyone has a debit card.

My car does have a computer, but it's pretty limited in it's performance.

My home has no computer at all, it has a rudimentary thermostat, and my stereo is not connected to anything except a dvd player.

The book thing is a little gray, as the internet has replaced trips to the library for most students. But I don't know how many people have those e-book readers yet. I still prefer paper for reading. But Newspapers are going out of business left & right.

NDRU said:

The point was that the technology only dreamed about 42 years ago is readily available. A computer in a car can be anything from a GPS, a back up camera, satellite radio, or just something that controls the transmission.

More newer homes than not have programmable thermostats, and many businesses do. It's all here, and that's pretty cool.

ernestsewell said:

no, you're right it's all there, and available.

It's just that while some people are in the future, many still live with old technology. We're still not all in silver jump suits.

I think the biggest oversights of things like this or sci-fi like Star Trek is the assumption that we'll ALL be living with this new technology (not that this article said we all would be, but saying "a rented terminal linked to a master computer will virtually run your household" isn't really true). But I'm just nit-picking

RodeoSchro said:

My road rage is bad enough....I couldn't imagine dealing with these idiots in the AIR too!!!

I live in an old house and drive an old car so the only thing that applies to me is being able to buy things over the internet with a debit or credit card.

I've always seen the 2000s as a letdown though. I expected to see flying cars, rounded houses on poles way up in the sky, robots doing housework, and average people being able to visit or live on other planets....in other words, The Jetsons type life. The only real inventions I've seen since I was growing up is the CD player replacing vinyl. As far as computers go, there were already computers but they just advanced and also became available in homes rather than just businesses. As far as cell phones go, that's just another smaller version of the car phones (remember Charlie's Angels). Everything is just advanced versions of what we already had. Nothing really new.

vainandy said:

and to be a total Debbie Downer, billions of people live with almost nothing at all!

Seriously though, if we were going to move into the future it might be nice to start by feeding everyone.

NDRU said:

You are nit picking. Technically you can rent a computer from RentACenter, as much as you can buy one from Target for $300.

Star Trek was also in the 23rd and 24th centuries. We're not there, yet.

NDRU said:

Until this is done .. I am not overly impressed by much else

when children are starving to death every second ...



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[Edited 1/5/10 13:07pm]

NDRU said:

Don't even get me started on this.

I'm going to hit up the Star Trek thing again, just to make a point about hunger. I was never a fan of the first series, but I was into The Next Generation. There was one episode where three people had paid to have themselves frozen (cryogenics). The Enterprise found them and thawed them out 300 years later. Of course they were confused and trying to adapt to a whole new world. I remember Deanna Troi (ship's counselor) explaining to them about how humanity had progressed past the point of doing things for money. (One person had stocks and wanted to see how much they had split by that point.) She also explained how they put their energies together and eliminated hunger and poverty, and now the goal of society, in general, was to educate and just learn more, to help everyone, to study art, science, music, different worlds, and at least attempt to live in some sort of cohesive society. The idea of Utopian, but the reality still had the ills of humanity (racism, religious bigotry, etc) here and there.

It's a great world, one in which I lived. We saw Picard still hand tying grape vines in a vineyard, as much as we saw him play racquetball in a holodeck. There was balance in the world, to a much greater extent than there is today. Why CAN'T we feed everyone? Why is money SUCH a goal for people? Money isn't the root of evil, the LOVE of it is the root of ALL evil. It's not about being poor, it's about having priorities in order. Money should never be #1 on a list like that. Let's not be stupid about saving and investing and making money, but you can't take it with you when it's all over.

There are miles of empty buildings in the world, and yet people are still huddling under bridges in dirty blankets to survive the winters. We waste SO MUCH FUCKING FOOD every single day we're here. Sure a lot of food will just absorb back into the earth, but why can't we get it into someone's stomach or fridge so they aren't having condiment soup for dinner? It sickens me.

one cool thing about Star Trek is that even if I think they are a bit idealistic and may be inaccurate in their predictions, they are optimistic and believe people are capable of rising above this crap we experience today.

It's nice to see a vision of what might be or what could be, other than the more-typical-for-today's movies' miserable post-apocalyptic future, ie what probably will be.

ernestsewell said:

His name and what year he won the Noble Prize in Economics escapes me now, but he received the Noble Prize because his was able to prove how nations kept food out of the mouths of their people as a way of control. His research also was able to prove who wealth Western Nation also used food rations to control other nations. As the saying goes, "If you can control someone's belly you can control their actions/thoughts."

Cool!