Back to the Future: 2008

Forty years ago, in 1968, Modern Mechanix carried an article entitled, "What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?" It probably was interesting reading in 1968, but it’s much more fascinating today.

The November, 1968 article was rather accurate in some of its prognostications:

Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees’ accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card’s number is fed into the store’s computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.

Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities.

In addition to programmed TV and the multiplicity of commercial fare, you can see top Broadway shows, hit movies and current nightclub acts for a nominal charge.

Remember that this was long before the creation of HBO, video-on-demand and similar pay-TV services.

However, most of the predictions have not occurred. Some of the more amusing predictions of 1968 include these:

The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn’t totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder’s spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments—on the average, about two hours of home study a day.

A typical vacation in 2008 is to spend a week at an undersea resort, where your hotel room window looks out on a tropical underwater reef, a sunken ship or an ancient, excavated city. Available to guests are two- and three-person submarines in which you can cruise well-marked underwater trails.

Another vacation is a stay on a hotel satellite. The rocket ride to the satellite and back, plus the vistas of earth and moon, make a memorable vacation jaunt.

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city's suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whiz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round.

You can read more at http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/24/what-will-life-be-like-in-the-year-2008.

Comments

[Happy Dae]

Undersea resort? What? Like the "Poseidon Adventure?" Still, mini-subs do exist today.

There are folks who've ridden into space fulfilling a life-long dream.

What isn't mentioned is that folks can go online and with less than a dozen mouse clicks can download their entire family history! Yeah, right! One of the FAQs we genealogy instructors get is "Which button can I press to get all the information on my family's surname?" LOL.

Moreover, there have been many developments that the 1968 editors could not have anticipated. It was a wonderful era for "futurists." I find the Internet with its blogs and videos simply amazing. And 40 years ago, such concepts were not published, let alone mainstream ideas.

Happy Dae.
http://www.ShoeStringGenealogy.com

[Marilyn]

My 8th grade science teacher in 1962 told us that the day would come when we would go to pump our gas and pay at the pump with a card which we would just wave at the pump. She also said, when people were just becoming aware that smoking was unhealthy, that they'd someday say that eggs were bad for us. Hmmm.

[Glenda]

I've been working on this for over 35 years, and have a really long way to go... which button do I push to get all my family's information??

[Terri Mindock]

There are already undersea resorts:
http://www.jul.com/
http://www.designbuild-network.com/projects/Hydropolis/

[Steve Spicer]

Glenda, push your belly button and your entire ancestry back to Adam and Eve will be imported into your favorite genealogical program.

[Jennie Vertrees]

"Necessity is the Mother of Invention" is an old adage. Many years ago, when our children were young, they had toy boxes their Dad made for them, but these couldn't hold all their toys. We had an old wooden bookcase with three or four shelves in it and I decided we could turn it on its back, put wheels under the four corners and put a handle on the front for ease in pulling that in and out from under their bunk beds. A year or so later, I saw similar items for sale and realized I was just too modest to try to do anything with something that simple. I was taken aback about a year ago, when our Wal-Mart store had plastic "blanket boxes" with wheels on the bottom, a lid on top and a handle in the middle of the front and was made to fit under a bed. A number of years ago I saw a "new idea," very similar to my pullout toy box, but never thought I'd see a blanket box of plastic for the same purpose.
I'm not surprised at anything anyone thinks up and then is smart enough to make it.
I also designed an undercounter, roll out cabinet piece to hold one row of canned goods on each shelf on each side of a center divider, only to discover a "new type of cabinet accessory" a year or so later. Yep, my roll-out mini pantry had been built by someone a year or so after my brainstorm for saving space.
If this old lady, myself, could come up with new things, someone with far more knowledge than I could come up with almost anything new.

[Miron Ophir]

"The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn’t totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder’s spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments—on the average, about two hours of home study a day."

Replace "Keeping up with new developments" with "Internet" and there you have it.