alt Hacker NewsThe future in old computer magazines (1984–2004)
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I think with the advancement of LLM many of those AI prophecies have been fulfilled. I found it sad that I’m no longer interested in that future, though.
That future is too close (or I'm too old). I prefer the optimism and future of the 1970's.
It was more space, robotics, vehicles—less about appliances, the home…
I love digging those retro future concepts that echo so well with our times.
As a side note, and border topic, it reminds me of the "My Uncle" (Mon Oncle) sequence of the Villa Arpel from Jacques Tati (who had the finesse to observe the paradoxes of society's evolution).
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuGA4ZNSS8c>
The fountain that switches on when important people get in and switches off when house employees walk by (in order to economize water), the automatic garage door designed like no one would ever need any security switch, the geometric garden where the characters end up walking awkwardly.
ps: I remember seeing those ads in another article. FWIW.
I can still remember reading about voice controlled Smart Home Control in the early 1980's in Popular Science magazine. The system ran on an Altair 8080 I believe and it had both speech recognition and speech generation. It worked with those X-10 modules. They called it "Breslin" and looking back I find it amazing they got it to work at all.
[1]: https://www.popsci.com/popular-science-breslin-home-computer...
Awesome! I love looking through old tech magazines and remembering how bright and promising the future looked in their pages!
The future ain’t what it used to be.
Love reading old computer magazines. In particular MacWorld, MacUser, Linux Journal, etc.
I want my computers to do my dishes but I guess it will do my art .
Some images are so heavily JPEGized that it hurts the eyes to look at them. Unfortunately it looks like the source scans from the IA are so...
STILL HAVE NOT GOTTEN OUR OWN STORE WITHIN STAR WARS
There is an old Usborne computing book that was a general introduction to computers published in approx 1982 that predicted in 25 years (i.e. 2007) we would have palm sized pocket computers with a touch sensitive colour screen, video camera and connected to a radio network.
Which I think is pretty impressive levels of prediction.
The tone of those articles suggests the authors anticipated a very different economic environment, probably in the spirit of "as technical progress marches on, so does the quality of life". So the machines were foretold to organize parties and choose suitable wines.
In reality these 2 went in opposite directions, clearly the speed of tech progress was underestimated and the kind of future economy was wrongly predicted. But hey, these were leisure magazines, who'd take them seriously.
The future used to be awesome because it was though by average people, scientists, writers, etc. even advertisers were catering for consumers and their hopes and dreams.
Once the future is being designed by CEOs of corporations the value-extracting machine creates the worst of possible futures.
We need to redistribute wealth back to the working class and let us decide a better future. With the current concentration of money and power in a few hands our only future is to repeat the middle ages.