Ah, that wonderful phenomenon known as the WikiWalk, so called because it usually involves Wikipedia. Whacha do, y’see, is start on a topic, and then, basically, wander about, clicking on whatever links catch your eye, often finding out things you didn’t know (or care about) in the process.
Anyway, I went off on a WikiWalk today, and completely by chance, I found something phone-related. And I thought, “Ooh, I have to blog about this, ‘cos it’s awesome.”
Y’see, what I found was this article from the pages of Modern Mechanix, with scans from a magazine published in 1956. And in this magazine, they laid out what they called “your telephone of tomorrow”. And what’s intriguing (to me, anyway) is how close they were in their predictions to what modern mobile phones are like, stating that it would: have push-button dialling; be able to instantly make overseas calls; do two-way video calls; and let you watch colour TV on it. In fact, they only missed two things.
Mind you, of the two things they missed, one had only just been invented (and wouldn’t become that visible to the public till about 1975) and the other hadn’t even begun to be conceived of, so we’ll let them off. Y’see, the two bits they missed are touchscreens and the internet, and they’re probably the two things that really define modern mobile phones, especially smartphones. Although the touchscreen was first invented in the 40s, it didn’t really hit the public consciousness until about 1975.
And as for the internet, well… no-one could have predicted how big that would become. The infrastructure of it, the actual “internet” itself, as a network, first started to be hinted at by the creation of ARPANET in the 60s, and the World Wide Web, the we now take for granted every day, didn’t come into being until 1991. There was just no way even the top boffins in 1956 (and when discussing 1956, ‘boffins’ is the only acceptable word to use for scientists) could have envisioned the vast, sprawling thing the internet has become in the modern world. Hell, they couldn’t even envision, in 1991, just how massively it would infiltrate just about every facet of modern life, from grocery shopping to reminiscing about 80s cartoons, from reading books to reading stuff of a more, er, not-family-friendly persuasion (well, when I say reading, I mean, mostly, ‘looking at the pictures’).
However… other than those two things (which is why their prediction is more like a Motorola RAZR than a Samsung Galaxy S, or an iPhone 4), they pretty much called everything that modern mobile phones are about.
Oh, and the third thing, which I only just thought of, is the fact they couldn’t have predicted how meteoric a rise Japan would have in the technology stakes…
However, all of this means that now, we, as a species have finally evolved past what was predicted in 1956, which gives me a nice warm feeling inside. Next stop, commercial nuclear fusion and flux capacitors!
I still have got my bleedin’ jetpack, though…
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