Slashdot Mirror
Tales of the Future Past
atlacatl writes "One of the coolest sites I've been to: Tales of the Future Past -
It tells the story (In pictures) of the predictions of the new millenium, early in the 20th century. I had forgotten the web was actually fun and interesting - use at your own risk."
I see a slashdot about to happen.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Not millenium.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
I predict that the website will in the near future not load but show an error. It will be known as the "slashdot effect". I also predict that some one will comment on the fact this is the second article about the future. I also see that in the near future I will be modded down...
Thousands of people depressing a button, causing a small box far far away to burst into flames.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Frontpage?
I see 3 posts and a melting server in 5...4...3....
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
STILL no flying cars...:(
I had forgotten the web was fun and interesting
/. will do that to you.
Hanging out at
Has anyone thought of using /. to perform DOS attacks?
"In the future, far too many people will make posts with jokes about the Slashdot Effect."
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
This is one of the great things about digging through old stacks of National Geo. Especially issues from the '50s and earlier. My Grandmother had tons of them and I would sit for hours looking at the diagrams of the moon base that was going to have been built by the '80s.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
We are the children who grew too fast
We are the dust of a future past
We raise our voices in the night
Crying to heaven
And will our voices be heard
Or will they Break Like The Wind
We are the footprints across the sands
We are the thumb on a stranger's hand
We made a promise in the night
Swearing to heaven Is this a promise we keep
Or one we Break Like The Wind
Hey!
We are the guests who have stayed too long
We are the end of the endless song
We send our hearts into the night
Soaring to heaven
And will out hearts still beat on
Or will they Break Like The Wind
Ooh, Break Like The Wind.
no
of filling up the horseless carriage with petrolium distillate, nad re-vulcanizing the tires, POST-HASTE!
So, settle on you jetpack, hitch up you blaster, and tune in the videotron as we tour Future Past!
Dig that futuristic spelling!
it happened.... /.ed after 8 comments...
tales of the future past...
If somebody set-up a mirror we will have tales of the future paste....copy/paste that is...
It's always interesting to analyze predictions of the future (made in the past) and see how reality differs. There's usually some assumption that seemed to make sense at the time, but turned out to be wrong over time. Then look at our current predictions about the future and ask whether we're still making those assumptions, or whether we're making different, newer assumptions that will turn out to be equally wrong. Excellent reality check.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
...I just broke wind.
In the future, as the number of /.ers grows, it will be faster to publish a site on CD and distribute it worldwide to small outlets than for all the interested parties to load the page across the net. :-/
This is a perfect example of the biggest problem with slashdot. The posting of this story seems to border on malicious intent towards the owner of that website. My advice is this: Do what I do, and read the "old news" section instead of the front page.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I am still waiting for my own personal airship that I can tether to tall buildings.
Da Blog
There is actually a travelling smithsonian exhibit going across the country to smaller communities on this ery subject. You read read about it here, it is currently in Rexburg, Idaho.
So lets all go and drop kick it into the next millenium! Very nice. This guy never even had a prayer. The inside of his server probably looks like the front row of a Gallager show.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
There's quite a lot posted there. Mostly referring to images, but here's a couple excerpts -- It was slashdotted while I was reading it...
TALES OF FUTURE PAST
It wasn't that long ago that we had a future. I mean, we have one now; the world isn't going to crash into the Sun or anything like that. What I mean is that we had a future that we could clearly imagine. The future wasn't tomorrow, next week, next year, or next century. It was a place with a form, a structure, a style. True, we didn't know exactly what the future would be like, but we knew that it had to be one of a few alternatives; some good, some very bad. The future was a world with a distinct architecture. It had its own way of speaking. It had its own technology. It was for all intents and purposes a different land where people dressed differently, talked differently, ate differently, and even thought differently. It was where scientists were wizards, where machines were magically effective and efficient, where tyrants were at least romantically evil rather than banal, and where the heavens were fairyland where dreams could literally come true.
A few years ago, people talked about building a bridge to the 21st century. Now that we're there, the phrase seems as odd as building a causeway to five o'clock. As Midnight brought in the year 2000 (or 2001 if you prefer), something odd began to sink in. For people of my generation, who had lived through the tarnished promises of the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the Computer Age, and the This That and Another Age, the year 2001 was a gateway. We waited twenty, thirty, forty years and some longer to pass though that gate into a time when spaceships the size of ocean liners plied between colonised planets, where cities were colourful collections of brand new towers without a single old building or blade of grass, where people wore jumpsuits like they were the togas of a technocratic Rome, where robots were our powerful and obedient servants, and where jetpacks were as common as galoshes.
Boy, were we off base. It isn't simply that the predictions were wrong. No one with half a brain really expected that sort of accuracy. And true, though some marvels did not come to pass, others that were and weren't predicted did. We certainly live very different lives from that of our fathers and grandfathers. That is not in dispute. But what did not happen is what many expected, though never talked about much. Assuming that we dodged the 1984, Brave New World bullet, our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin. We expected some how, some way that we would be on the road to being freed from the human condition. We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Carl Sagan as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is, science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied.
Still, there was a romantic innocence about the 20th century's view of the future. It was a sort of plastic Camelot; in both senses of the term. So, settle on you jetpack, hitch up you blaster, and tune in the videotron as we tour Future Past!
FUTURE CITY
This is Frank R. Paul's depiction of a city of the future and is pretty typical of such predictions. The city is a massive pile of steel, plastic and glass put together in a way that not only has no past, but actively rejects it. It is a place of heroic technology with skyscrapers the size of whole districts, Roof-top aerodromes, wide pedestrian boulevards, and metal roadways strangely devoid of traffic. There are even urban space launch pads where giant rockets are winched upright before blasting off to the heavens. Noise regulations, Smoise regulations.
The iconic image of the future is the city
Blah, I'm still waiting on the crater-front property on the Moon that I signed up for :(
Join the TWIT army now!
Pffft. "...looking at the diagrams of the moon base..."
C'mon admit it, you were ogling the african girls in their native state of undress.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
...David Sarnoff, RCA President, Predicts "Television will Carry the Mail".
Actually he wasn't too far off, eh?
I had forgotten the web was actually fun and interesting
And thanks to the Slashdot effect, I can't be reminded of that fact, you insensitive clods!
Lets see what don't we have. Flying cars? Yup got those just need some obscene amount of cash + piolts lisecense to get one. http://www.moller.com/skycar/ Hover boards? Got those too,although their more surf board than skate board sized, and with a large engine hanging on the back. Still not cheap. http://www.futurehorizons.net/hoverboard.htm Thos cool screens that take up the whole wall. Got those too, provided you can afford it. http://www.superscreen.com/ Video phones. Got those, not too expensive but most people just don't care about them. Won't bother posting a link every knows about these. OK so where still missing our space elevator, can't have everything I guess.
The 1936 movie of HG Wells' Shape of Things to Come is good for this sort of thing. Captures that 30s "futuristic" look perfectly.
Da Blog
this site only seems to have a past
Striving to be common...
The 1936 movie of HG Wells' Shape of Things to Come is good for this sort of thing. Captures that 30s "futuristic" look perfectly.
Da Blog
The images are doctored/faked. Check out the ferris whell of death, the picture of the magazine cover it was printed on says more about it can be read on page 666. Too many other mistakes to mention, looks like someone was looking for some /. attention
http://leela.lasthome.net/www.davidszondy.com/futu re/
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
More on Brasilia's depressing architecture here.
The Army reading list
"I can slashdot that webserver in nine posts..."
"I can slashdot that site in eight posts!"
"Slashdot that website!"
Persons of a "certain age" will remember that game show. I sure don't!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Since apparently i read the article too late and thus it was slashdotted
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
This could have been a great website, featuring what people thought the future would look like, comparing it to what it ended up looking like, and featuring some analysis as to why the discrepancies occured, or at the very least some surmises.
It's not easy telling the future, and I doubt very many of the magazine scans and "future" products were meant to be authoritarian "this is what it WILL look like" presentations. Rather, they were "hey, wouldn't it be neat if we could have this in the future?" With that view this could actually have been an inspiration to help develop what we already don't have. Instead it was turned into a poorly written "ha ha, what stupid ideas"-fest.
What's the use of even putting up this website when all it is doing is slam those who try to have some sort of vision?
--I am Sun Tzu of the Borg. Resistance is feudal.
Da Blog
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:4haymSLdvzoJ: www.davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm+&hl= en
For people who've been a little late
Only read this comment for humor (well relevance if you agree with me of course)...no Modding down for RUSH references :-) But this really made me think of the lyrics to "A Farewell to Kings"
When they turn the pages of history/ When these days have passed long ago/ Will they read of us with sadness/ For the seeds that we let grow?/ We turned our gaze/ From the castles in the distance/ Eyes cast down/ On the path of least resistance/
See what I mean?
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here. Although that link seems a bit slow aswell... *sigh*
Silly rabbit
Does anyone have pointers to any record of the first /. effect anywhere as googling for "first slashdot effect" doesn't turn up any results
- 'Any'one
The fact that I was most interested in the moon base and not so much the naked natives probably explains a lot now that I think about it.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Anyone else think this name is reminiscent of Days of Future Passed, the album on which Nights in White Satin appeared?
How about posting bittorrents with a pdf of the web page in the future, instead of posting links to the actual page - spread bandwidth requirements.
Is there any way to track the number of downloads in bt? The info could be forwarded to the originating website for tracking info.
While working with digital collections a university library, I unearthed a of turn of the century(19th to 20th) copy of The Emblamer's Gazette. One of the articles I found was a speculative look forward in the new century. The article devoted a lot of space to a discussion of an emerging technology, the automobile. Not only did the gazette predict the demise of the horse and carriage, but they predicted urban sprawl and the development of the modern city.
It was a good and decent website who brought joy to many. With it's passing it shall be missed. Let us all join hands and pray for it's resurrection with the adding of bandwith or mirrors. Amen.
Surely I'm not the only one that saw the opening Futurama sequence when I looked at those covers on that website.
YOu fool, those are LESBIANS...
This really begs the question...
What would you do for a Flying Car?
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
"Immantize the Gernsback continuum!"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Around the turn of the century there were fantastic advances in our understanding of physics, which led to us mastering electricity and atomic physics.
Ask any person over the age of 90 what the greatest invention of their lifetime was and they will almost certainly say something that was made made possible by electricity, or our understanding ofatomic physics.
In the late 19th century we developed the internal combustion engine. We developed airplanes at the beginning of the century. In the 1930s we developed chemical rockets. Since then what have we developed as far as propulsion or transportation technologies go?
Not much. It's easy to imagine how much optimism there was after these initial advancements. Lately basic physics has branched out into such technologically unproductive pursuits as String theory. They are interesting to mathematicians but the technological fruits aren't there. In my opinion we have entered a technological slump that may last for quite a while.
A nice and cheap book about the future as imagined in the early 20th century :
http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/3822815667/
The original or what got changed for syndication. IIRC the original last line was bart cutting in with "Quote the raven; Eat my shorts!", that line wasn't there last time i saw it on tv. They edit futurama on Adult Swim sometimes too, which is maddening... They cut the professors line "Sweet zombie Jesus!"...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Flipping the bird at 400 million years of evolution.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
But we may be making the same mistake. More power was the biggest deal until about 1970. Then smaller became the big deal. But this doesn't mean that smaller is going to rule forever. In particular, our predictions of nanotech and biotech may be just as naive as the predictions the site laughs at.
So what will the future really be? I don't know. Maybe "more connected" is going to be the next big area.
yeah, the moon base was firm, those natives sag too much.
This poster is smoking future weed. The future sucks compared to the Jetson's vision of life in the future.
So i havn't seen the images, but in the conception of futurama, i know they based a lot of the artwork and the technology within the show on predictions of the (our) near future from the '50s or so. Its really aparant, especially in the first season of futurama. The design of the planet express ship, the tubes everyone travels around in, all the traffic signals and streetlights hover, and all the other stuff like that.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
You have likely hit the nail on the head - we are likely to see more and better applications of network theory (along with attendent refinement of the theory). It is becoming clear that just about every robust and fault-tolerant (note I did not say "faultless") system involves or is a network (or a network of networks, such as the human body). These discoveries and others are likely to shape a lot of the coming century.
If you (or anyone else) are interested in this trend, you cannot go wrong by reading "Linked" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (ISBN 0-452-28439-2).
Of course, this, like every other prediction, could be wrong. We are seeing the application of network theory in a number of areas currently (social networking tools like orkut and friendster are the ones in the spotlight) - whether it is simply a fad or whether it will truely yield new insights, though, is anyone's guess...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
From the article: We certainly live very different lives from that of our fathers and grandfathers.
I don't see this, even though I'm probably one of the older people here. In the 50's and 60's, my parents had cars, telephones, televisions, and most of the appliances we have today. The only really new things we have are computers.
These images mostly come from quite some time back. It is funny to see the change in what a 1930s author predicted compared to a 1960s author compared to a 1990s author. More recent science fiction has tended toward a grittier look for cities and earth. No more of the sanitized, everybody happy and everything in its place images of the 1930s and 1940s (back when people though World War I was "the war to end all wars". This was a time when "clean cars" were pictured with white tires (or at least white walls).
I think my favorite image of a futuristic city was in Fifth Element. Fifty years from now I'll have to travel to NY and see if that vision had any merit.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Some wild'n'crazy older scifi books that look several million years into the future:
Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men
Sun dying in Red Giant phase, humans try to evolve a group mind.
William Hope Hodgson's The Nightland
Sun and all stars dead. Last humans living in nuclear-powered cities... their nuclear fuel is dwindling. Naive traveller explores a weird Earth now controlled by monsters of the dark.
Brian Aldiss's Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand
Deliberate "Stapeldonian" style. All stars dying. Naive galactic travellers explore a weird Galaxy, last humans meet their posthuman successors.
Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun
Sun dying. Naive traveller explores a weird Earth.
These books span a century of science fiction but all share a common theme: thermodynamic inevitability. It's been a common theme for far-futurists since the mid-19th century. Here's what the ever-cheery Wells had to say about the ultimate fate of mankind after the Sun's extinction in the Time Machine:
Da Blog
In the Gernsback inspired sci-fi magazines there may
have been a lot of optimism for the future, but there was a lot of pessimism in the 30s too. Somewhere I read something that was supposed to be a comment by Freeman Dyson about how grim things looked in the 30s, and how much better things are than what people feared would happen at the time. Or consider books like '1984' (written in 1948) or 'Brave New World', written in the 30s. So far, things are better than what they predicted. It seems like we've dodged a lot of bullets (in this parallel universe at least), that doesn't mean we'll always dodge the bullet of course.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I have many old Popular Mechanix and Popular Science (and a few old Popular Electronics, etc) from the 30's-60's - and the old issues most certainly had wacky imagery on the covers - I have one showing these huge planes (like, Spruce Goose size or larger!) getting a "boost" for launching by rolling down a very tall and big "ski jump"-type ramp, catupulting off it into the sky! I have another issue, which at least looks more real, but is scary in the image it portrays (Science and Mechanics, April 1963): "Wonderful Machine That Stops Parkinson's Disease" - shows this guy laying on the table with these probes in his head (no "halo" or anything like you would see in a real radiographic surgery today - don't twitch!) - the crazy thing is while this is an illustration, the inside article shows the real thing, and no halo there either! Supposedly developed at the "State University of Iowa Hospital", the equipment being developed by the "University of Illinois" - it supposedly worked via ultrasound. This is a real article, real pictures - enough information for you to follow it up if you so wished (makes you wonder if it worked?)...
The image published of the "Ion Propelled Aircraft" (Popular Mechanics, Aug 1964) - that is a real issue, I am looking at it on my desk right now (cost me $5.00 to buy the issue, originally priced at 35 cents!). What is interesting about this article (if you read the actual article), you would see what was being demonstrated are actually what we /.'ers know as "Lifter" technology (I had to sneak in a JNL ref!) - do a google on "lifter", "jnl", and "Major de Seversky" for more info - all real stuff, he was demoing this long before the internet (but still no progress made toward a real craft) - the article is fun though - Seversky's crafts look no better or worse constructed than "modern" versions (likely he used nearly the same materials - balsa wood and tinfoil).
Finally, yes, these magazines were dedicated to helping the common man learn about science and technology, and the impact they had on the normal joe's life. In most of them (the good ones), there were many "do-it-yourself" artciles on building all manner of devices and such, from simple barbeque grills, to more complex devices (answering machines, garage door openers, electric edgers, helicopters, small planes, small cars, both gas and electric, etc). At the time, people were more willing to build such devices (people also were less stupid - and less litigious - probably because TV wasn't as prevalent) - many items shown were either not available for the homeowner, or only at a great cost (many articles showed how to build things that could be bought for much more, out of stuff most people would throw away - for example, the electric sidewalk edger I mentioned used a discarded vacuum cleaner motor for power). All of this "do-it-yourself" stuff declined rapidly throughout the 70's-80's, and these magazines all dropped off, or changed radically from what they once were - leaving the husks of "Popular Science" and "Popular Mechanics" as they are today.
Sad, really - and reflects an even sadder state for the people of today's society - who couldn't "DIY" to save their life, it seems...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Looking at the past's future, I can see where they broadly missed the mark. But who really thought we'd be launching rockets from the middle of downtown? Life in "THE FUTURE" doesn't seem all that different from back when. You can access your bank account from about anywhere, talk on the phone anywhere, and shoes have gotten crazier looking. Otherwise, I haven't had the opportunity to ride in a flying car, a robot doesn't do shit around my house, and girls are still batshit insane.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
80 patents doesn't sound very frustrated to me...
And the giant buildings may still come to pass. That would be "arcologies" to you SimCity fans.
--- Ban humanity.
Welcome, to the World of Tomorrroooww!
/.
I wonder if that was too vague? Of course not, this is
Ask any person over the age of 90 what the greatest invention of their lifetime was and they will almost certainly say something that was made made possible by electricity, or our understanding ofatomic physics.
I actually had the opportunity to do just this a couple of years ago when I was having a conversation with some in-laws (a brother and a sister) who were in their late 90s and still totally alert. They were old enough to tell me of their travails of having to "score" liquor from dealers in dodgy neighbourhoods in the US during prohibition.
Anyway, being young and naive of course I asked the "what was the greatest invention or discovery or change" in the 20th century? I was expecting, of course, something different from their unanimous answer: Radio. I responded with "What about TV?" Their answer? One of them said, moe or less, "TV was nothing special, just radio with pictures. We'd already got used to broadcasting". Sadly, both of these great people are now dead.
Radio was magic stuff - binding together huge communities cheaply and effectively and "magically" without visible wires. People would huddle together and listen to words and music, exercising their imagination to create pictures within their heads that corresponded to the active narrative coming out of the little magic box.
Remember in the 1920s that the science fiction genre got started within the pages of radio electronics magazines!
Radio was the zeitgeist of the times. Just look through any magazine of the time and you see endless classifieds for radio operator/engineer classes, certifications, and so on. Radio in the 1920s was like the Internet in the 1990s - everyone wanted a piece of it, it was the new frontier of communications. In fact, without radio it's doubtful that the Nazis would so effectively have seized control and indoctrinated so many millions of people in Germany.
I note in passing that radio continues to be a huge agent of social change, for good or ill. The genocide in Rwanda was orchestrated and performed using "talk radio" hosts to coordinate the decentralized death squads. In a country with little infrastructure or reputation for efficiency, the Tutsi butchers in Rwanda killed over a million people at a rate more than five times faster than the best extermination efforts of the stereotupically efficient Nazis during World War 2.
Da Blog
For Tutsi, read Hutu!
Da Blog
Looks are one thing, but to live in a place like that is quite another. An absence of vibrant city streets gives a feeling of isolation that just doesn't feel right in a city. A sprawl of freeways does not a community make. See my journal for more on this topic.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I did build a bridge to the future but I burned it too soon...
We are only now stumbling across the phenomenon of "nemory": an event that never happened, that you don't remember. These nemories are our experiences of "dark info", apparently the vast majority of the info in the Universe. In the future, nemories will be exchanged so much that we won't even notice.
--
make install -not war
Frontpage !
There are funny jokes hidden behind the pictures. Run with images off to see them.
Folks would like to see the topic of debate before it's /.'ed.
/. process folks!
Wow! give a server/administrator a warning and/or break before putting it thru the
Any mirrors on this site?
Sincerely, Czephyr
Where, oh where, is my Maralyn Monrobot???
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
is my jet-belt, jumpsuit and food-pills. I want to go to the moonbase and eat algae-cakes. I deserve a flying car. When my robots are not busy cleaning my house, I want them to smite my enemies. I want a disintegrator gun. Dammit, they promised.
There are two robot dogs in that painting. Can you see them? No? Me neither :)
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
It appears to me that Tesla was really just fogotten, it seems that at one time his inventions (like his "death ray") were considered serious work.
Glad to see it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Having looked at the site and seen how all those early 20th century predictions of mammoth soul-less multi-level cities with swarms of flying cars failed to materialise, I notice that even though we're only 4 (or 3) years into the 21st century, one of the major predictions made at the turn of this century has failed to materialise - the success of the DotCom boom. So it looks like contemporary futurologists are a lot worse than their colleagues from 100 years ago.