Originally Posted By: larry818
Philco/Ford was pretty cutting edge


I'm surprised at how many things their vision of the future got right (though maybe just a few years early), and how many things were wrong in hilariously interesting ways.

For instance, online internet shopping is shown; very prescient. But then it says that the store she's shopping at is a brick-and-mortar store with a set of live cameras feeding her pictures of the wares on the shelves.

Telecommuting, and online banking and bill pay, those were pretty much spot on as depicted, except for the part where the guy had to view grainy microfiche pictures of his bills and his bank statement, and then had to print out the bill in order to balance it.

It's like they could imagine connectivity, and the things we might want to do with that connectivity, but no concept of how the input/output would function. The 60's vision of the future always figured everything would be voice control or dedicated buttons for each task. I guess the futurists didn't like typing, so they ignored the existence of keyboard terminals?
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Tony Fabris