I really meant to post this five years ago. I am not kidding when I say that I have had these Xerox’s sitting on my desk for five years waiting for me to get off my ass, scan and share. I don’t know what took me so long as it would have been pretty awesome if I did this around New Year 2000. Oh well.
One day I was scanning through the microfilms at my local college library when I came across a section for a now defunct magazine called Creative Computing that was printed in the late seventies. I randomly grabbed a roll and scanned through a few issues. Pretty neat to see how much stuff has changed. I quickly came upon the following article where they asked their readers what they believed computers would be like 23 years in the future; AKA the year 2000. It is a neat read and I think you guys will enjoy it and I figured that someone back in 1977 would have wanted folks from nowadays to look back on the article and have a laugh. I also included two pages of ads just so you could compare the prices then and now. I also copied an article from the 1979 CES that I might make another thread for if you guys want.
PS, sorry about the huge size of the scans and the crappy quality. These are copies of copies of copies and I wanted to make sure that the text would stay legible.
PPS, Thanks to Goonse.cx for image hosting.
PPPS, How many of you are wearing your computer designed Moire shirts?
50% thought that “pocket computers” would have independent capacity equal to current “third generation” computers (IBM 360, Univac, etc) Hell, PDAs nowadays are so different than a Univac that it’s almost impossible to even compare the two
51.3% thought pocket-sized memory units will have capacity equal to contemporary disk memories (will have capacities of approx. 1 billion bits per cubic inch). *lessseee… I can get a 4Gig Flash card that’s about 1 inch square (flat, not cubic). 4 Gig is about, hmmm, 4 billion bytes, so we’re talking 32 billion bits… so yeah, we can do that. *
only 33% thought it was likely that the majority of US computers would be linked into a general computing/memory network. Ha! It’s the whole bloody WORLD that’s linked, lol
35% thought that we’d program by song and dance. WTF?
Also of interest in the text was the idea that we’d teach programming in elementary school. It’s obvious that the people who did the survey never really dreamed of just how ubiquitous computers really became, and how comparatively user-friendly they’ve become compared to early computers.
I just wanted to say that I read the whole article and really enjoyed it. I didn’t get into computers until the late '90s, so something from that far back is totally foreign to me. But it also fascinates me. Thanks for sharing this with us.
I was 13 when that article came out. I don’t remember reading the actual article, but I was a big reader of that magazine, Byte, Dr. Dobb’s and others along those lines. Great memories.
I still have my first issue of Byte magazine. Shame it had to die.
I understand that all the security problems associated with Internet Explorer can be traced to a single Microsoft employee singing slightly out of tune.
Funny you should mention that; I’m building an educational stand-alone turtle-type robot right now, but it isn’t going to be large enough to have a built-in keyboard for programming; I plan to give it an audio spectrum analyser instead, so that it can be programmed by whistling a tune (or playing it on a harmonica or something).
Not a particularly new idea (telephone DTMF tones are similar), but my robot should be able to respond to song programming.
[2028 user]
What is this “programming” of which you speak? We just tell the computers what we want, and they do it. Or they tell us what we want, and if we need them to, they do it.
[/2028 user]
Well, by the year 2000, one thing hadn’t changed… people still couldn’t spell “MILLENNIUM”, but to get it wrong in the enormous headline of the article is pretty poor :smack:
Actually, I meant to post something along similar lines a while back… prompted by a curiosity search in Google Groups (Usenet) for the phrase “by the year 2000”. Some quite amusing results.
There’s a remote chance that speech recognition systems will provide more efficient document input than typing by then. Maybe.
I don’t know if that whole “holographic output” thing in the article will happen by then, but it did bring up an interesting memory.
In the late 80’s or early 90’s (I don’t recall exactly when), a company I was working with had a neat prototyping device. You could design a part on their 3-D CAD system, and it would output that part made from plastic, even if it included “un-toolable” cavities. IIRC, it used a series of light beams (lasers?) and a tank of semi-transparent liquid. Where the beams intersected, the liquid would harden. They swept the beams through, working from the inside of the part out, and then drained out all of the liquid that hadn’t been hardened. It was quite cool, and I think it would qualify as 3-D output!
I found the demographic breakdown interesting. Of respondents to a computing magazine survey (a group one would think would be fairly technically savvy), only 54% used a computer every day, and almost a quarter used a computer once a month or less.
Remember, this is not the general public we’re talking about. This is a bunch of geeks who not only read computer magazines, but have the time to fill out and mail in (no web-based forms in 1977) the survey. And these people on average use computers only once a week (and that is considered “frequently”).
The last time I went an entire week without using a computer was in January of 2003, and then I was on vacation in a foreign country.
Okay – everybody who had a computer at home in 1977, raise your hand.
I was a heavy-duty computer geek, and was in college at the time. I used a computer every day at school, but I couldn’t afford one for home until I got my Altos machine in 1978. During the summer, I definitely didn’t have access to a computer every day.
