Abacus | Space tourism, flying cars, virtual reality: a look back to the future of technology
- While some predictions of the 1950s futurists took a little while to become reality, many of the ideas have come true
- Over the next decade, we can expect to see advances in everything from food to space exploration, and even commercial supersonic flight
I GUESS YOU GUYS AREN’T READY FOR THAT YET, BUT YOUR KIDS ARE GONNA LOVE IT
Today is my parents’ 63rd wedding anniversary, and if all goes to plan, they will soon get the Christmas present the family planned but could not deliver on time – a big 4K LCD television they can shout at from the sofa to change the channel. In 1958 they would not have dreamed voice control like that would be possible, and colour televisions were still years away from being widely adopted.
They were married in a pretty church in leafy Ewell in the south of England, and jived to Elvis and Chuck Berry at their reception, all of which was recorded in a black-and-white photo album shot on roll film. Some 40-odd years later, film became obsolete, and wedding party dancing would be shot on a pocket telephone.
ROADS? WHERE WE’RE GOING, WE DON’T NEED ROADS
In 1954, General Electric predicted flat screen televisions would be hung on walls by the mid-1960s, but they remained big, bulbous beasts for the next 30 years. I first saw a colour flat-screen television in Tokyo’s Akihabara in 1986 for about 5 million yen – US$30,000 back then. Of course now they are as big as your living room can handle, and sell for a few hundred dollars.
