What the year 2008 is like! (hint: no jetpacks!)

[thewayne]

A transcription of a 1968 magazine article. Amazingly, they hit quite a number of things spot-on or very close. There's a definite utopian feel to it IMHO, but that's ok. They totally skip over the oil costs of plastic and ignore waste and power. And they totally miss the boat on domed cities, underwater/outer space vacations, and auto-cars.~

Still, an amusing read. I wish I'd read it in '68, but my dad subscribed to Popular Science, not Mechanix Illustrated.

My mom once asked me what I thought computers would be like in X years, I don't remember the number she used. I said "small, more powerful, a little less expensive, and anything else is a guess." I hold to that, especially after seeing the specs on our AS/400 in the back room. ;-)

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/24/what-will-life-be-like-in-the-year-2008/

And there's some cute comments on Slashdot: http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/25/2337211

Comments

[quasar273.livejournal.com]

Hmm, there's a lot of inaccurate guesses, as one would expect, but the one that hit me hardest was that the reader of the article is presumed male, a wage-earner, with a housewife at home. So much speculation about changes to the environment, and almost none about changes to the people inside.

[silveradept]

It's still interesting to see what the past thought the future would look like. The technological advancements are fun to look at. Are there similar publications from 1968 that speculate on our society of today?