According to a report from Yahoo! news (apparently video from an LA-area news station), this video of a 1967 educational film “accurately predicts” information age wonders like email, on-line shopping, and the like. So much so that (again according to the report) some folks wonder if its a fake. However, the father in the video is an identifiable celebrity (hint: He’s better known in the US as a host of several game shows), and given the content (particular the underscoring of gender roles) I’m willing to believe the footage was genuinely shot in 1967.
Now, personally I don’t believe this video “predicted” anything close to what’s claimed; the “on-line shopping” is really just a housewife using a camera to view the contents of a store, and “email” is implied but never mentioned. I’m also more inclined to chalk this up to “scattershot”; if enough of these types of films were made, one of them was bound to be close to the technology we eventually saw in 1999.
But I’m wondering about the board’s reaction to this film; do you think it’s an “accurate prediction”, or just an interesting curio?
It’s a little uncanny with the similarities to on-line shopping, bill pay, “instant post office” and the mention of Home computers, but the clip was made by Philco, who were already building computers at the time. It’s not too surprising that they would come out with something that says “In the future, everybody will use what we make!” Also, we have to remember that this was filmed a full five years after The Jetsons which should tell us that the ideas in the clip didn’t exactly snap into existence from a creative vacuum.
Heh. Not bad—though (understandably) it’s like the filmmakers couldn’t quite wrap their minds around how different or improved such systems would be over the existing world. I mean, the “email” was written by a stylus on a touch pad to be sent to the recipient (I didn’t get any implication of character-recognition turning it to text), the online shopping was, as CJJ noted, just a CCTV system linked to a local store. Really just crude electronic extensions of extisting shopping practices, not a next step in evolution.
Kinda like some older science-fiction story where you’d see a guy in the future using an electric prod instead of a whip on his ox team, or a team of robots to run a telephone switchboard.
P.S.—I love the three, aparently identical, terminals and monitors in “Father’s” office, only one of which was even turned on. Maybe one handled letters A-M, the second handled letters L-Z, and the last you used to enter numbers and punctuation?
The gender divide and the stylus-driven ‘home post office’ aren’t unconnected. Typing was a menial task, for young women on low pay. If father was the one dealing with the accounts, then why on earth would he be have to be lumbered with an electronic typewriter?
IMO, it doesn’t predict anything accurately at all, except for the most basic concept of more advanced electronic communication. By the descriptions given by the narrator, there is absolutely no suggestion of anything remotely resembling the internet, but rather hard-wired connections from A to B.
We didn’t have them in '73, so I guess they didn’t have them in '67. We did use keyboards to type out our punch-cards, however, which we then carried in batches to the computer operator — a forbidding person with magical powers who was allowed to feed the god. Computers were big back then and made whirring sounds with their reel to reel tape drives. Large platters were just coming in.
ETA:
Regarding the video: the most amazing part of it to me was the bit about the husband paying the bills that the wife incurred, implying that he was the bread winner and she was the house keeper. I think that was the same year that a man and woman appeared on the game show Password. The man was introduced and asked “What do you do for a living?” After chatting with him, Allen Ludden turned to the woman. “And what does your husband do?”
Just to show what a remarkable year 1968 was, it was only one short year after this video and that game show broadcast that Women’s Liberation was launched as a cause, and women burned their bras in public demonstrations and stuff. What a time in America it was.
I swear I remember seeing a calculator around 1968 or 1969 that had a display made of a row of stacked tiny neon tubes, each shaped like a number. The appropriate tubes would be lit to display the results. God only knows what it cost.
What struck me was the ending bit, about how they would maintain reliability by the computer regularly monitoring itself, and switching in new hardware to replace parts that had failed. The hardware looked like a telephone exchange of the era, with lots of plugs going into sockets. Obviously they had no idea how integrated and miniaturised circuits would be a major key in enabling computers to be more powerful.
I first learned computer programming in 1964, as an undergraduate maths student, and the first computer we worked with was even then obsolescent, being composed of thousands of valves and large circuit boards with lots of wires that were pulled in an out to reprogram it. We wrote our programs on punched paper tape. Later that semester we were allowed to write programs for a more modern IBM mainframe on punched cards.
Back then there were keyboards, of course, for typewriters and for linotype machines. We used a small keyboard like a calculator’s for making punched paper type, and a larger keyboard like a typwriter’s for making punched cards, so keyboards were being used in conjunction with computers then. And linotypes were used predominantly by men, as were computers, back then, so it wasn’t as if anyone should have thought that men could not learn to type.
Also from 1967: The President’s Analyst, which predicted what amounts to cell-phone communications. (TPC – “The Phone Company” – plots to implant everyone with a wireless micro-telephone in the ear – no more repair trucks!)
Well, it accurately predicted Wink Martindale worrying over bills in the year 1999. I can’t imagine the residuals for Tic-Tac-Dough are paying his mortgage…
