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So what technologies do we have today that would sound like science fiction to you when you were in your teens or growing up? How does the future of today differ from the ones that your parents imagined growing up?
For me: since I am young I would have to say the iPad looks like something out of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Also, the touchscreens on phones are way more high tech looking than TNG. How about you?
Damn we must have really been jaded, or at least I was, because in the 60's anything that was "science fiction" wasn't fiction just technology that hadn't been developed yet.
Computers existed so what is amazing that they would become smaller and affordable.
Dick Tracy had a video capable phone, we have walkie talkies and TV, so it didn't take an Einstein to see that someday they would combine the two.
Now I will admit that I didn't see the internet coming, but then I don't remember much in the way of science fiction that would have hinted at it. But that's about it.
That is an interesting video. They predicted some things correctly, but really had no clue. They could see huge flat screen tv's coming and computers with printers connected to satellites (conceptually similar to the internet), and the ability to communicate with many different rooms inside of the house from one place.
It seems that they envisioned future technology as these big, clanky metallic objects such as huge piano sized keyboards to control things instead of handheld sized remotes or Ipads. They thought robots the size of human beings would be in every home to do basic daily tasks for people. The funniest part was the microphone to give commands or make phone calls. Also hilarious was the chair that automatically climbed stairs while the person was sitting in it. Where they really got it wrong was the idea that people would only need to work 30 hours per week and that 2001 would be some sort of leisure society.
I want to add two medical technologies Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) and Magaertic Resonance Imaging (MRI) both weren't on the map in 1965 . Equally amazing Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Ultrasound imaging. In the laboratory scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopes (STM and AFMs)not even invented until the early 1980s. Also who would have predicted high temperature superconductors (being metal oxides or arsenides), fullerenes, nanotubes and now graphene. From the vantage point of the 1960s sufficently advanced to meet Arthur Clarke' s of magic.
The now ubicqudous cell phone. Yes we had trek and their communicators, which predated the Enterprize, but the whole idea that the world would be connected with something you carried with you, that the phone from the phone company would be a fading technology.
It is amazing to think of the changes having a phone which goes with you have wroght. Even in terms of how a family works. You leave the kids with the sitter, for your night out you give the sitter your number. There is a sense of never being disconnected. I took the train to the west coast through west texas, and no cell reception. People kept pulling them out and checking. And its your watch, calculator, scheduler, address book and often mobile internet and notepad.
In the sixties there was a version of mobile phones, but it was clunky and relatively unknown. But the concept of how we see and act in our world is the magic that made a toy on tv into something we don't really see as remarkable now.
And the internet, in combination with mobile technology has actually achieved the Global Village.
So what technologies do we have today that would sound like science fiction to you when you were in your teens or growing up? How does the future of today differ from the ones that your parents imagined growing up?
For me: since I am young I would have to say the iPad looks like something out of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Also, the touchscreens on phones are way more high tech looking than TNG. How about you?
Virtually all of it would have seemed like science fiction back when I was a kid, and I'm only 43 - not exactly ancient.
In the UK we had 3 black and white channels on TV: BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. No remote controls - you had to actually get off your lazy backside to push clunky buttons on the TV. No mobile phones at all. Just big clunky bakelite phones wired into the wall with a finger dial.
I remember watching the video phones on the movie 'Bladerunner' and thinking 'nah, that'll never happen in my lifetime' - but now I talk to my family on skype all the time.
My kids cannot believe there were no computers when I was a teenager.
My first career was as a graphic designer and when we say 'cut and paste' it was literally that - cutting bits of typeset paper (produced on something like a typewriter) and literally glueing them to the artwork on an art board and using a parallel motion to line it all up. You had to measure and draw everything manually.
I remember when the first apple macs came out - black and white to start with on a tiny tiny screen but they were revolutionary to graphic designers.
Look at phones now - a computer and internet right there in your hand that can tell you virtually anything. I can even see my husband making his way home from work (we have tracking devices).
Its really astonishing how technology has advanced just within my lifetime.
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