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.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
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
STILL no flying cars...:(
I had forgotten the web was fun and interesting
/. will do that to you.
Hanging out at
"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?
So, settle on you jetpack, hitch up you blaster, and tune in the videotron as we tour Future Past!
Dig that futuristic spelling!
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?
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.
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
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
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
Do what I do, and read the "old news" section instead of the front page.
That's a neat trick since this is still the most recent article and you've managed to post a comment on it long before it got to the old news section.
Jason
ProfQuotes
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
You forget the operative word. Basic, fundamental investigation is where all the neato cool interesting stuff comes from. We have no idea what that stuff will be, but it will come, if we are prepared to let people continue their research.
Just think what the world would be like if the Powers That Were had told Messrs. Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen to quit messing with those ridiculous bits of germanium, that crazy chemistry and that silly quantum theory (none of which has any application anyway, you know) and work with something real, like better tubes.
...laura