During a recent road trip, my wife and I got into a discussion about KITT from the Knight Rider show. It was posited that a number of the ridiculously advanced capabilities that KITT had at the time would now be possible in a current car (although probably not all, because my vague memory of the show tells me that some of his capabilities were absurd). I imagine that Siri-like capabilities would allow today’s cars to talk to us — at least in some limited fashion — if we wanted. And KITT had something akin to GPS that allowed him to self-navigate, which Google’s cars can also do.
This got us to wondering what else from Knight Rider and other old TV shows (I suppose Star Trek is an easy candidate for this one) had “future” technology that we have available to us now, and that seemed like a good question for the Dope. So what say you all?
At the little Toronto Comicon last week, Levar Burton mentioned that whenever he used his iPad, he thought about the prop PADDS that they had on Next Generation.
The dog walking treadmill from the Jetsonsturned into reality, well sort of.
A whole line of flip phones was based on Star Trek communicators. And modern makers of automatic pocket doors will have them make that whoosh sound like the doors on Star Trek. People just expect it.
Robert Heinlein was advisor and writer for a TV show that never happened in the c1950s. The episodes got re-packaged into a black and white movie called Operation Moonbase that has alternately wonderful and cringe-worthy things side by side.
One of the wonderful things was a telephone that had a handset not connected to it – both the desk miodule and the handset had little antennas sticking out of them, but there was no coiled cord between them.
What was neat was that nobody explicitly pointed this out – they just used it. If you didn’t notice it yourself, you’d never know about it. And, for a time, there were quite a few house phones just like this, with little antennas “connecting” the desk module to the handset.
The telescreens from 1984 are a reality, except IRL they don’t aren’t two way. Not that we couldn’t make bigscreen TVs with discreet cameras if we wanted. Maybe we already do.
The interesting thing about the ST:TNG Pads was how a file was stuck in the pad it was originally entered into. You see all the time characters handing pads over to each other so the other character could read them. The portable data device was thought of, but not the idea that data could transfer from one device to another seamlessly. It was even more interesting when you consider that the computerized stations and desktop screens were all networked together and could call up any file, but their portable devices couldn’t.
There was a later season episode of ST:VOY were the crew made contact with the Alpha Quadrant, but because of bandwith limitations could only communicate via letters (essential email). So far so good, but then after they got their first batch of letters from home Neelix proceeded to distribute them to the crew by carrying a bucket full of PADDs all over the ship. :smack:
