Thank God, because this is one of the stupidest straw men ever. Flying cars are technologically feasible. It’s not our inability to make them that has held them back.
It was a steak kinfe to the heart when I was at the local museum and I saw, in the 1970’s vignette, a TI-99 4/a and Chariots of Fire. I have both in my basement and can immediately put my hand on them…
Course, I don’t think I have a TV that’ll accept the TI’s inputs.
Oh! oh! My wife just picked up an** aerosol can of icing. **
The future is now, folks.
Glow-in-the-dark aquarium fish.
Augmented reality for my Nokia phone.
That and I’m creating a tentacle monster in my garage right now using microcomputers that are probably more powerful than the ones that put men on the Moon.
I was recently looking around online and I realized that a torrent containing pretty much every popular computer game from the 80-pre cd 90s was smaller than my thumbdrive. My OLD thumbdrive.
I got to use the Picturephone at the Bell System exhibit during the 1964 Worlds Fair. Last year we did video calls to our daughter in Germany for free, or free after we bought cheap webcams.
Arthur C. Clarke predicted, in Voices from the Sky in about 1960, that some day distance wouldn’t matter in telephony. The concept of a “long distance” call is about dead in the US, and my daughter’s Russian friend was able to buy a $5 / month unlimited international calling plan so he could talk to his mother in Moscow from Palo Alto whenever he wanted.
And I remember both when they were new. Funny, that kind of brings to mind something you can’t do now that you could do then: Fix the damn things. It used to be that if a piece of electronics was starting to go wonky, I could take a soldering iron, some desoldering braid or a solder sucker, and reflow cracked solder joints, replace chips or resistors or whathaveyou, and fix them. Try that on your modern surface-mount, micronized hardware! You’d have to be a Keebler elf to get at the components.
You can get adapters that convert the RCA jack that plugged into the RF switchbox into a standard cable coax jack. I used to collect vintage consoles and computers a few years back and had a dozen of the things; bought 'em for a couple bucks apiece. Worked great.
Whenever I use the Dyson airblade handryer at work. Seriously, looks like it should be in a sci-fi film.
Wait, isn’t your shoe/telephone the past?
Hell, even better than that, they sell pancake batter in an aerosol can! My wife’s cousin bought some. I almost sprayed pancake batter all over my ice cream sundae.
Oddly, I saw a guy at Costco returning 3 cans of it. Said he didn’t like it. But my kids seem to love it.