Just like in Back to the Future II, Micheal J Fox got old in the future.
But seriously:
Total Recall subway car screens:
Total Recall also had real silly looking cars… and we now have the Aztec and the Scions.
Star Trek gave us Q, the Omnipotent, all-seeing judge of human failure. Which we now have today in the form of the Military Training Instructors, utilized by the Air Force at Basic Training 
Slightly more seriously, Battlestar Galactica portrayed female combat pilots back in the late 70’s, which didn’t happen IRL until a few decades later (even on the show, it was far from the norm). There had already been women serving in uniform as pilots as far back as WWII though, so not a huge prediction.
Sorry to be snarky but
In the original Battlestar wasn’t it because of a shortage of male pilots ?
appleciders waterbeds have been around a long time, over a hundred years, in the medical context at least.
On the Galactica, yes, it was originally due to not having enough men to fly (at first the women trained on the shuttles, then some of them moved on to fly Vipers). When the Pegasus turned up, we found out that the wing commander aboard that ship was very much a woman indeed, Captain Sheba, Commander Cain’s daughter. I’m not sure if they ever explained the circumstances of her becoming a pilot.
I know in various bits of sci-fi, we’ve had voice-operated computers (such as on Star Trek), and nowadays we have a limited form of that (my old cell phone could perform various functions on voice command, and would even make a somewhat lame attempt at voice-dialing by having me say the name of someone in my address book. More often, I’d just end up voice-dialing someone with an entirely different sounding name.)
Star Trek had them storing information on small cartridges which would be loaded onto various computer consoles when the information was needed. Now we use flash memory and thumb drives in an identical fashion. In fact, what we use in real life now is even more compact than the futuristic data cartridges they used on Star Trek (sadly, I haven’t seen any Data Crystals like on Babylon 5)
How far back do medical scanners like MRIs go? Can we pin that one on Star Trek too?
You’re right - in haste I misread a source that I consulted.
The name of the short Clarke talked about satellite communications in was “I Remember Babylon”. It was more of a satellite TV idea than communication idea, but we have both now so…
Well fair enough, thank you - I have to say I don’t remember the Pegasus turning up in the original series. Either I’d fallen out of “lurve” with Starbuck by then or we didn’t see all the episodes in the UK or I dunno.
That does suggest a conflict within the Galactica world tho’ doesn’t it ? Maybe the creators suddenly had a change of heart.
Heh. That reminds me Hitchcocks’ *Notorious *(1946) - plot of which involved uranium and Nazis in Southern America. Hitch was even suspected by FBI and laughed at by critics for unplausible SciFi plot elements. And then Hiroshima exploded and it was no more SciFi…
Yeah, I geeked out like mad when I found out the Pegasus was going to be in the new show. In the original show, the Pegasus had been thought lost a few yarns before the Peace Conference, when she lead a fleet of warships under Commander Cain (played by Lloyd Bridges in one of his awesomest roles) deep into Cylon territory.
Basically, for far less humanitarian reasons than the Galactica’s, the Pegasus could have found herself with a similar shortage of qualified pilots as well. You’d be amazed at how many original ideas the new show leeched from BSG and even G:1980.
I remember that episode.
To paraphrase: the Cylon driving the ship that teh Bad Guy was riding in: “What should we do about the Battlestar?”
Teh Bad Guy: “What do you mean, we’re destroying the Galactica right according to my nefarious plan.”
The Cylon: “No, I mean that *other *Battlestar.”
As the Pegasus swoops in and shifts the balance of power…
Cool.
There are a lot of things that SF got right, although there are an awful lot more it got wrong (and I say ythis as a big fan of SF). A lot of the things they got right happened because of paying close attention to scientists and engineers working at the time, or because of well thought-out extrapolation.
Jules Verne got a lot right. One that I keep bringing up is Lightweight Heavier-than-air Aircraft Built out of Composites in Robur the Conqueror – to my astonishment, they were using such composites in railroad wheels. The use disappeared and people eventually forgot about this, and not even aeeonautical engineers seem to recall that Verne had built The Albatross out of composites. He also had Rubber Survival Suits in The Tribulations of a Chinaman. He was extrapolating on work going on at the time. A lot of his predictions about space flight in From the Earth to the Moon and its sequels (including the use of an aluminum space capsule, a launching point in Florida, and other details) were spot-on (It’s likely that he knew that using a “Space Gun” instead of a rocket would splatter the passengers, but he needed a workable way to get out of the Earth’s gravity well.) His Submarine the “Nautilus” in 20,000 Leagues Under the sea was light-years ahead of the technology of his time. There was a lot that was righht about it (including diving planes to direct the sub downwards), but things that were wrong, as well. It’s surprising that the Nautilus didn’t have either a periscope or torpedos.
H.G. Wells predicted the use of tanks on the battlefield (in The Land Ironclads), the importance of airplanes for oving war beyond the front lines (in The War in the Air) and the use, as mentioned above, of Atomic Bombs. As mentioned above, Leo Szilard says that Wells’ book The World Set Free, gave him the knowledge of the importance of atmic weaponry. Wells didn’t think the atomic bomb 9or its name) up by himself – he lifted it from a popular book by physicist Frederick Soddy, a man who deserves to be much better known.
Wells also came up with a primitive vision of the Internet in his “World Mind”, but Leinster/Jenkins’ image is quite a bit closer in A Logic Named Joe. As Exapno Mapcase has pointed out more than once, Leinster owes much to Vannevar Bush – but Leinster’s extrapolating to kids downloading porn seems to be his own extrapolation.
Heinlein tossed off plenty of predictions as backgropund, many of which have come to pass (like the palm-sized cell phones in Space Cadet and the wireless phone handsets in the film Operation Moonbase. He rightly regarded this sort of thing as a “parlor trick”. Most of his predictions haven’t come true – we’re nowhere near circumstances that could prove them.
There are plenty of other examples, some of them amazingly accurate. But, as I say, there are a lot of things people missed:
–The ubiquity and real nature of computers. Nobody really imagined anything quite like our home computers, with their capability of word processing, doing taxes, and playing computer games. Despite the suggestions of Wells Leinster, Clarke, and others about the Internet, these were pretty rare, and even these authors never seemed to imagine anything like the Internet culture that has developed.
–Television was seen, early on, as a communications medium, not as a one-way entertainment medium. Even when viewed as an entertainment medium, it’s been seen oddly. Henry Kuttner, in The Proud Robot, imagined a future in which people went out to large communal theaters to see TV – essentially replacing movie theaters directly. This, for the most part, hasn’t happened (although my local movie theater does have special Red Sox broadcasts on the big screens in the summer.)
–Spaceflight hasn’t been as cheap or as easy as it’s been made out to be. In particular, big business (as in Heinlein) and private effort (as in Raymond Gallun, and others, including Heinlein) hasn’t been interested or able to get into space, and the whole “outer space as the Wild West Frontier” aspect that was so popular in the 30s and 40s and 50s (and even today, with Firefly/serenity and Cowboy Beebop) seems less and less likely.
So does the “dying planet Mars” setting.
it’s enough to drive a Scientist like me Mad. And if I ever do manage to invent a Teleporter, the first thing I’m going to do is ride through it with a Fly.
It’s been really strange to see the giant flat-screen billboards from **Blade Runner **become a reality.
Not any one thing specifically, but I find Ray Bradbury’s **Fahrenheit 451 **eerily prescient given how ubiquitous iPods are today (like the Seashell earphones in the book) and how obsessed some people are with upgrading their TVs to the latest gigantic flatscreens.
From Wiki
The modern waterbed was created by Charles Hall in 1968, while he was a design student at San Francisco State University in California. Fellow SFSU students Paul Heckel and Evan Fawkes also contributed to the concept. Hall originally wanted to make an innovative chair. His first prototype was a vinyl bag with 300 pounds (136 kg) of cornstarch, but the result was uncomfortable. He next attempted to fill it with Jell-O, but this too was a failure. Ultimately, he abandoned working on a chair, and settled on perfecting a bed. He succeeded. However, because a waterbed is described in the novels Beyond This Horizon (1942), Double Star (1956), and Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein, Hall was unable to obtain a patent on his creation. In 1980 Heinlein recalled in Expanded Universe that:
"I designed the waterbed during years as a bed patient in the middle thirties; a pump to control water level, side supports to permit one to float rather than simply lying on a not very soft water filled mattress. Thermostatic control of temperature, safety interfaces to avoid all possibility of electric shock, waterproof box to make a leak no more important than a leaky hot water bottle rather than a domestic disaster, calculation of floor loads (important!), internal rubber mattress and lighting, reading, and eating arrangements—an attempt to design the perfect hospital bed by one who had spent too damn much time in hospital beds."
However, Heinlein made no attempt to build his invention.
Nod to E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops for showing a networked community, including social isolation due to an over-reliance on virtual communication.
Flying Cars, which you can order here. Well, not just yet, but hey.
Back to the Future 2 is the obvious reference here, but I’m sure there’s older. 
Bradbury himself commented on how similar 1960’s transistor radios (the ones with a single earplug) were to the Seashell earphone.
I had to pull into a gas station yesterday to put air in one of my tires. The air/vac machine had a debit card slot.
I shit you not.