Remember When

Quote: Fleastiff

Remember when Inter Library Loans were FREE.

Budget for an electronic reader your library supports. I looked into that a long time ago, but never got one.

What the future is going to be like in 1999AD

Skip the first one minute and half.

Pretty bleak future. Everybody still wears 60's
clothes and the computers all have toggle
switches and resemble the micro film readers
we had in the school library. These future
fantasies always involve crap they have at the
time, only gaudier and bigger. Actually,
most things get smaller as the future
unfolds. Cars, phones, appliances. TV's
got bigger, but weigh 20 times less.

at least the kitchen doesn't fold away into the basement, an idea that never seemed to deal with the fact that to make the kitchen a space that can change into a different kind of room means creating another room that only serves to store the stuff. The mechanism would have to be a nightmare of possible breakdown problems too.

I saw a 1950 movie where the cops
put an electronic tracking device
under a car. It was so big and heavy
and full of tubes it took 2 men an
hour to install it under a car. And then
it hung down inches from the road,
with an antenna that went out to the
side. You would have to be an idiot
not to see the thing. State of the art,
it was the 'future' of 1950.

Quote: Evenbob

I saw a 1950 movie where the cops
put an electronic tracking device
under a car.

It sent out a signal of course. Tracking that was tricky, as those doing so had to locate the very source of the signal .

Today it's GPS; a device would broadcast the coordinates, probably using cell phone service. If someone has a cell phone, sometimes they turn it on and have it broadcast, a device ready-in-place we all have on us. The police can turn on and activate a phone someone had off and with the GPS inactivated too, you can google that. Taking out the battery is the only sure way to defeat it.

They also had a device on the car
that dripped 'glow under a black
light' liquid. They had a black light
spotlight and followed the glowing
dots on the road as well as the
radio signal. With all that they lost
the car in less than a minute. I'm
sure the audience was agog at the
modern technology.

Remember these? Still the most popular commercials
ever on TV. They did a whopping 250 of them, they
were on for years.

Quote: Evenbob

Remember these? Still the most popular commercials
ever on TV. They did a whopping 250 of them, they
were on for years.

She eventually got upset because so many people thought she was married to him.

Speaking of cameras, remember in the 70s/80s, usually on P.I. type but some others, where the guy would be in an office with a little camera, taking pictures of some document he found that was important to the story line?

I do wonder if those were based on real cameras, but I thought about it for the first time recently. See, I spend a good part of my day, using my iPhone to take pictures of documents I need. New tech, but same idea, standing there and taking pics.

I don't get to drive around paradise in a fancy car after, but of course TV P.I.s are zero like what the job really is.