H Veeder <[email protected]> wrote: A 1968 view of future communications > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOELouwBDI > (note the gender stereotype - she buys, he pays) >
They got the basic ideas right, but the mechanics wrong. You would think that by 1968 people would realize that video text would be used instead of facsimile. I have a 1966 special edition of Scientific American devoted to "information" (computers) that shows this. It is interesting that they have the woman shopping by looking at a video image of actual clothes on display in real time at a store, rather than looking at photos of the merchandise such as you find at Amazon.com. On-line shopping is more like using a Sears catalog circa 1968 than it is like going to a store. It is an older business model brought back into use. That often happens. I think Clarke had a better grasp of the ramifications than some other people did. Others predicted a narrow range of on-line activities. Shopping often comes up, for some reason. Reading books or watching movies on line was less often predicted, I think. Incidentally, the Scientific American advertisements are full of gender stereotypes and sexism. It is a polite magazine. Like many other academic institutions, they did not realize how sexist they were. It used to annoy my mother to no end. A 1976 highway as envisioned in 1956 > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6keHpeYak > Way wrong. They could never have imagined the GPS or Google's self driving car. No seat-belts! It is interesting how much technical information the car provides. A computer simulated voice tells you the "turbine input temperature" etc. A Prius screen gives you a lot of data. When technology is new, the manufacturer sometimes gives customers Too Much Information (TMI). My brother has a stereo set from the 1960s with a logo on the front saying "FET transistor" (I think it is). Not one person in a thousand back then knew or cared what a Field Effect Transistor was. It was the latest thing. It sounded good. - Jed
