The Syfy channel is doing a Twilight Zone marathon today. One episode, To Serve Man (March 1962), had a flat screen with a wide screen format. I thought of this thread when I saw it.
I just ran into Love in the Future. That sure looks to me like a flat screen. Though it’s called a “television” it’s really a two-way picture phone.
The date is an amazing April 1932. The magazine is Pep Stories, one of the endless number of risqué, spicy, or girlie pulps put out in the 1930s. The stories were all innuendo. Nothing happens in this one deeper than a kiss. Just putting a man in a women’s bedroom without her screaming was outrage enough. *Pep *didn’t even have a section of nude photographs.
The girlie pulps swiped from every other genre for plotlines. “Love in the Future” is true science fiction by the standard that its plot requires a futuristic technology - a picture phone - to exist. No f&sf database or reference book mentions it. The author, Frank Kenneth Young, is in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, though, for a story in Mind Magic and a poem in My Self. This deserves inclusion, as well.
Just shows that television was a future given from the very start, in modern form.
I’m still chasing this down and haven’t written a full article about it. But check out L’Uomo Meccanico (The Mechanical Man), an Italian film about a robot from 1921. The link goes to a scene in which we see two robots battle, with the creator apparently guiding his robot by remote control through a flat-screen viewer. Whether that is television or a movie screen or something else is hard to tell, but it looks even more modern than the one in “Love in the Future.”
My guess is that it was easier to imagine flat-screen television before televisions in all their clumsy three-d depth became common.
Potentially our homes will just be a room with a padded toilet seat and a small kitchen. The majority of our visual experience will be replaced with computer generated objects and displays that are projected directly into the visual cortex by a lense or integrated into the eye or optical nerve itself.
Why bother with physical items at all, if you can live in a mansion and transport to work in an instant, virtually?
Maybe in their universe, by 2010 everyone was just really into retro gaming, where nothing beats a CRT.
And flat screen telephones.
Babylon 5 predicted that in the future personalized newspapers would be printed on demand by vending machines.
Assuming you meant “retina”, there, that’s already how everything you see works. It’d all projected directly onto your retina through the lens of your eye (and possibly the lens of a pair of glasses or contacts).
LOL: I recently finished playing Phantasy Star 2(1990) on my flat screen TV.
Mildly related (but not really), I worked as a PR intern at NEC when the flat monitors were just breaking into the market. They were a pretty big deal then and the people making Stargate wanted to borrow a bunch for a scene set in the future (uture-uture!). For some reason, it took a lot of haggling between the two parties and I think NEC finally loaned them one or two. They took the monitors and built them into the set, putting fake ice around them or something so they really weren’t recognizable anyway. So yeah, Stargate kind of predicted flat screen monitors would be in the future and covered in ice when they were already being made or something, I guess.
D’oh, yes retina.