* * * * *
                                        
                            Visions of Futures Past
                                        
Obligatory Sidebar Links

* Computers in the home: 1990 [1] (from Compute! December 1982)
* The Last of the Xanadus [2]


> And the exhibit showed electronic cars that we'd all drive to work in 1997,
> and ways to raise more food for the world through hydroponic greenhouses
> we'd all use when we went to Mars, and so on. Epcot was originally going to
> be a huge experiment in sustainable living, but when Disney realized there
> was no money in that, they had GE, GM, and AT&T drop these huge
> advertisements for life in the future. And the same thing is, in 1983, it
> all seemed so fucking feasible that in 20 years we'd all have video phones
> and TVs with smellovision and pod cars, and I remember that view of the
> future so vividly. And now that future is in the past, and none of it
> happened. I used to read in Compute magazine about how, maybe if we all
> tried hard, cars might have a single microprocessor in them, and it would
> be so cool to get so much blazing power out of an 8-bit 6510 wired into our
> engine. And now, I've got at least twenty processors sitting on my desk, in
> my watch, in my camera, in my mouse, and none of them are doing anything
> remotely as interesting as what I thought they would be. I have ten times
> the computing power of that Xanadu house sitting in the battery charger to
> my camera, and none of it is being used to automatically cook my food or
> turn on the jaccuzi when I get home from work. And that's sad, in a way.
> 

“Tell Me a Story About The Devil: The assorted ramblings of a Midwestern
writer in Denver [3]”

Xanadu [4] has been torn down, and we still don't have flying cars.

I want my future back!

[1] http://www.commodore.ca/history/other/1982_Future.htm
[2] http://www.roadsideamerica.com/set/xanadu.html
[3] http://www.rumored.com/journal/html/20060105.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_House

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

.