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Many of the entreprenurs, technologists, scientists and engineers who helped create our modern information age where impressionable young people growing up in the late 1960s and got hooked on TV shows like Star Trek, The Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.Outer Limits, Fireball XL5, UFO (I still remember Lt. Joy and the Moonbase Girls) or even Rod Serlings T-Zone.
So things were planted in our minds and and one figured out how to do it and who wouldn't want something way too cool just like Admiral Nelson's USS Seaview.
the guy who created the first working cell phone said as much. He lived at the beach and did runs for exercise along the shore. He'd come home and there would be a pile of messages from the people he worked with, so he had to call all of them back. He was also a dedicated trek fan, and thought to himself it would be nice to have a communicator. So, being and engineer, he decided to try.
The first working model was a large flip design. Guess where he got the idea. He very purposefully set out to create someone like the things he grew up with on tv, and now in a very real way we have the communications of their world.
Give me one of those fully loaded runabouts, with a long range transporter just in case and some phasers while your at it. Who'd want a clunky stace shuttle?
Just speaking for myself, I actually expected the 21st century to be like the Sci-Fi of the 1950s depicted. We seemed so close at that time, I'm still wondering how we slipped up.
the guy who created the first working cell phone said as much. He lived at the beach and did runs for exercise along the shore. He'd come home and there would be a pile of messages from the people he worked with, so he had to call all of them back. He was also a dedicated trek fan, and thought to himself it would be nice to have a communicator. So, being and engineer, he decided to try.
The first working model was a large flip design. Guess where he got the idea. He very purposefully set out to create someone like the things he grew up with on tv, and now in a very real way we have the communications of their world.
When the original Star Trek was produced from 1966-8, the Network would not pay more than 70,000 $ per episode and so the team under Mr Jefferies in the Desilu Studios property and costume Department had to produce a quality SciFi TV program for almost nothing by todays standards and they didn't have computer generated special effects. A lot of the gizmos were made of wood (amazing what you can do with silver spray paint) , the Transporter solved the expensive problem of filming a spacemodel landing and Dr. McCoy's little glass sensing devices came from the staff cafeteria which was down a Salt and Pepper shaker. Ever wonder why so many planets reminded you of The Gunsmoke set?
Give me one of those fully loaded runabouts, with a long range transporter just in case and some phasers while your at it. Who'd want a clunky stace shuttle?
I am sorry, I meant Shuttlecraft Galieo, or perhaps you would want to upgrade to Worf's runabout on DS-9?
I concur, all those shows opened up your mind about the future, the world and a hope that we could get past the Bi-polar world we found ourselves in. Land of the Giants was another.
We might not be flying round the sky in wee selfie rockets like Flash Gordon. but now we can grow and ear on the back of a mouse , whod have thought that could ever happen....
Technology was making leaps and bounds back then so they predicted what it would be like if that trend continued. Also technology has continued to advance but just not in the direction they thought. Instead of flying cars it went to computers and game systems and cell phones, DVDs etc. I still think technology is capable of going farther but people want to preserve a more normal way of life so it's held back. Flying cars are possible it's just that there would be even more accidents and fatalities from drunk drivers etc. and more crowded airway and chaos. A lot of technology that we are capable of is held back for safety reasons or because it's impractical etc. But we do have a lot of things they imagined like visual phones like skype, handsfree phones like blue tooths etc.
I think things move in waves. We advance but in tiny steps until some huge moment, usually applicable to many uses, which opens a new door. Then people expect the next door to open tomorrow. But it took a lot of time in invisible steps to get to that door, and we were so busy being dissapointed from the last one we didn't see half of them
But I think we'll have a new 'wow', but maybe not immediately. We are at the center of an explosion of new technology now, but while the lowly transistor raido was huge when it first was marketed, we're used to technology getting better and branching out. We're the generation who took the computer out of the scifi story and room full of tape drives (movies favorite version of the computer until 2001, since they made noise and stuff moved) to a sea of big and little ones and the computer being a part of our lives. Those of us who remember when it wasn't like that still feel something of that 'wow'. .
There have been a few authors who have studied the history of technology, and they reached similar conclusions-that game changing technologies seem to arrive in waves, or, to use the metaphor above, a new door opens.
Recent years have featured one sort of wave, based on information technology (IT). When this matures, what will the social consequences be? In terms of doors, I think that society will have stepped through one.
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