The future, past and present

One of the neatest things about the blog Paleo-Future is the way it consistently reminds you how far off the mark predictions about the future have always been. (Where's my three-wheeled runabout?)

So it is with a bit of skepticism that I read in the Guardian about a smoothly running, traffic jam-less "world where cars drive themselves, people could be tagged so they are constantly monitored, and nearly all modes of transport can be run by computers rather than people."

The future, revisited

Longtime GreeneSpace readers will remember my fascination with the modern history of the future.

So naturally I welcome this new blog Paleo-Future ("A Look into the Future that Never Was") and the related Flickr group.



Kitchen computer, marketed by Neiman Marcus, 1969, on display at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

The Kitchen Computer was featured in the 1969 Neiman Marcus catalogue as a $10,000 tool for housewives to store and retrieve recipes. Unfortunately, the user interface was only binary lights and switches. There is no evidence that any Kitchen Computer was ever sold. Inside was a standard Honeywell 316 minicomputer, billed as the first 16-bit machine at that price from a major computer manufacturer.

Via Cliopatria, which also points to an interesting syllabus from a course on the history of the future.