The Electronic Home (circa 1988)

Ameritech's (late 1980s) concept video The Electronic Home envisions the futuristic world of HDTV and videophone, as well as internet-like services that allow you to make restaurant reservations (at a cartoonishly stereotypical Italian restaurant), shop for kimonos (because your shirt is made of giant playing cards), or buy a house (with your Atari joystick).

The Electronic Home
by paleofuture

This rather primitive, closed-network system is not unlike the one we saw in the 1993 AT&T concept video, Connections. While I wasn't able to find a specific date for this video, it does use footage from the 1987 GTE concept video Classroom of the Future, so we'll call it "circa 1988" until we learn otherwise.

I'm not an expert on telecommunications law or history, so I can't give the necessary background information to understand Ameritech's motives in this video. But it's pretty clear this video was intended to influence people in power to let Ameritech (now AT&T Midwest) establish a communications network it didn't feel it was able to provide at the time. In other words, look it up and get back to me. I'm talking to you, media-tech nerds!

Previously on Paleo-Future:
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)
GTE's Classroom of the Future (1987)
Motorola's 2000 A.D. (1990)
Pacific Bell Concept Video (1991)
Flowers by Alice (1992)
Apple's Knowledge Navigator (1987)
Apple's Grey Flannel Navigator (1988)
Vision (Clip 1, 1993)
Vision (Clip 2, 1993)
Vision (Clip 3, 1993)
Starfire (1994)

But the Internet has no Dewey decimal system... (1995)

With search engines acting as such a necessary tool for internet use in 2009, we sometimes must remind ourselves that they did not come pre-packaged with cyberspace.

The 1997 book Predicting the Future looked at past and contemporary predictions of the future and assessed their accuracy. A 1995 prediction by Bill Gates about "the internet as a self-publishing medium" was met with great skepticism due to the lack of editors and, believe it or not, a Dewey decimal system on the web. An excerpt from the book appears below:

The lack of an equivalent to the Dewey decimal system on the Internet is a different matter. While it is true that experienced Internet users can eventually find what they're looking for, [Clifford] Stoll and other critics insist that it takes more expertise and time than Internet enthusiasts are willing to admit. This point of contention may eventually be answered by software developments that are still just blips on the horizon. But such a development, according to many experts, including both Internet boosters and doubters, is likely to have to await a formalized method for paying royalties to those who self-publish on the Internet. Bill Gates is sure this can be managed down the line, but as things stand there are still vast legal tangles to be resolved concerning payment to original authors whose work is published by major companies, let alone compensation for self-publishing.

Previously on Paleo-Future:
The Internet? Bah! (1995)
The Answer Machine (1964)
Bill Gates on Charlie Rose (1996)

"Broadband" by Australia Telecom (1992)

The 1992 Australia Telecom concept video, Broadband, taught us about Orwellian biometrics, 1980s music video catwalks and beeping user interfaces of the future. All three parts appear below.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

See also:
Australia Telecom's Broadband (Part 1, 1992)
Australia Telecom's Broadband (Part 2, 1992)
Australia Telecom's Broadband (Part 3, 1992)

Computer Games of the Future (1981)

This holographic computer game of the future is from the 1981 book Tomorrow's Home by Neil Ardley.

The caption explains, "A home computer game of the future has solid images of spaceships that move in midair. These are holographic images produced by laser beams. The game is played with other people who also sit at their home computers and see the same images. Each player controls a ship and tries to destroy the other ships. Guess which player is winning!"

The entire text of this two-page spread appears below.

Your day in the future continues. It's not a school day, so you can do whatever you like. However, it's raining, so you can't play outside. Although scientists can now control the weather, this is done only in certain places to produce artificial climates that aid farming. Your home is not one of these places.

Even though everyone is busy and you're stuck at home on your own, you're still going to have an exciting and interesting day. After breakfast, you rush on to the living room. It has chairs and other furniture in new designs as well as some antiques like a twentieth-century digital clock and a push-button telephone. However, the room is dominated by a large viewscreen linked to the home computer.

You ask the computer to contact several friends, and they begin to appear on the screen. Soon you're linked into a worldwide group of people, all of whom can talk to and see each other. After chatting for a while, you decide to play some games together. As you can't agree on what to play, the computer makes up your minds for you. It gives you puzzles to do and devises quizzes, as well as all kinds of electronic games. The computer keeps the scores as you play against one another, and then it gives you games in which you all play the computer. You carry on until someone loses interest and tries to cheat for fun. The computer finds out and everyone laughs. Then it's time to break up the party and have lunch.

After lunch you decide to spend some time on your own at a hobby or craft you particularly enjoy. Making things of all kinds is easy with the computer. You design them on the screen of the terminal in your playroom, and then the computer operates a machine that constructs the objects in materials such as plastics. This system is very good for making your own clothes. You can dress up in all kinds of fantastic garments that you design yourself. To avoid waste, the objects and clothes can be fed back into the machine and the materials recycled or used again.

See also:
Future Arcade Games (1985)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (Part 3, 1993)
Virtual Reality (1980s-today)
Homework in the Future (1981)
Home Entertainment of the Future (1981)
Learning in 1999 A.D. (1967)

The Internet? Bah! (1995)

Waxy.org has a link to a February 27, 1995 Newsweek article stating that this whole Internet thing is a bunch of hype. Author Clifford Stoll proclaims, "no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works." You can read the piece in its entirety here. Excerpts appear below.

Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly [on the Internet]. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.

. . . Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames--but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past?

We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

See also:
The Answer Machine (1964)

Australia Telecom's Broadband (Part 3, 1992)

Today we have the third and final installment of the 1992 Australia Telecom concept video, Broadband. Enjoy.

See also:
Australia Telecom's Broadband (Part 1, 1992)
Australia Telecom's Broadband (Part 2, 1992)

Australia Telecom's Broadband (Part 2, 1992)

Part 2 of the 1992 Australia Telecom concept video Broadband demonstrates teleconferencing via videophone, as well as encrypted data transfer.

Oh, and scary metal walkways of the future. Don't forget the walkways.


Stay tuned for part 3, coming soon.

See also:
Australia Telecom's Broadband (Part 1, 1992)

Australia Telecom's Broadband (Part 1, 1992)

The 1992 Australia Telecom concept video, Broadband, envisions the futuristic world of 1996. Part 1 shows us videophone conferencing, moving large amounts of data between computers, as well as (Orwellian) biometric scans.

See also:
Motorola's 2000 A.D. (1990)
Pacific Bell Concept Video (1991)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)
Flowers by Alice (1992)
Apple's Knowledge Navigator (1987)
Apple's Grey Flannel Navigator (1988)
Vision (Clip 1, 1993)
Vision (Clip 2, 1993)
Vision (Clip 3, 1993)
Starfire (1994)
GTE's Classroom of the Future (1987)

Classroom of the Future (Part 3, 1987)

Without further ado, the third and final part of the 1987 concept video, Classroom of the Future.

See also:
Classroom of the Future (Part 1, 1987)
Classroom of the Future (Part 2, 1987)
Homework in the Future (1981)
The Answer Machine (1964)
The Road Ahead: Future Classroom (1995)
Closer Than We Think! (1958-1963)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (Part 7, 1993)

Classroom of the Future (Part 2, 1987)

Part 2 of the 1987 concept video Classroom of the Future is fairly accurate in depicting what the Internet would eventually allow people to do. Again, the voice synthesis and recognition seem superfluous.

See also:
Classroom of the Future (Part 1, 1987)
Homework in the Future (1981)
The Answer Machine (1964)
The Road Ahead: Future Classroom (1995)
Closer Than We Think! (1958-1963)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (Part 7, 1993)

Electronic Shopping (1983)

Terry R. Hiller wrote an article titled "Going Shopping in the 1990s" for the December, 1983 issue of The Futurist magazine. Mr. Hiller was understandably skeptical of the prospect of electronic shopping. However, many of the things he asserted would not come to pass did indeed happen.

An excerpt appears below, along with graphics from the piece.


Nor is electronic retailing equipped to deal with the logistics of delivery. Product information, selection, and billing can all be transmitted electronically, but physical merchandise must be physically moved. Today's mail-order houses depend on federal or private package delivery, services that are simply not structured for the huge traffic increases that large-scale teleshopping would generate. It would require not only the total restructuring of existing routes and systems, but an investment of billions of dollars in equipment and personnel - resources we are simply unable to spare either now or in the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, since teleshoppers can only view products piecemeal, electronic marketing has severe drawbacks as a retailing device. In nine square feet of drugstore shelf space, you might easily encounter as many as 80 or more different brands and sizes of cold remedies. But in electronic marketing, shelf space is defined as time- the number of second an item appears on the screen. Allowing even 10 seconds per item, it would take more than 13 minutes to show that same 80 items. Add to this the cost of production, handling, and shipping, and we begin to suspect that the "convenience" of electronic marketing will be very expensive. Unless we are prepared to sacrifice variety - and therefore competition - some products will never be purchased "in absentia."


See also:
Online Shopping (1967)
Mobile Malls (1981)

Starfire (1994)

Today we have the 1994 Sun Microsystems concept video Starfire in its entirety. You can still access individual clips of the program from the links below or you can download the video here.



See also:
Starfire (Part 1, 1994)
Starfire (Part 2, 1994)
Starfire (Part 3, 1994)
Starfire (Part 4, 1994)
Starfire (Part 5, 1994)
Starfire (Part 6, 1994)
Starfire (Part 7, 1994)
Starfire (Part 8, 1994)

Starfire (Part 8, 1994)

And now, the thrilling conclusion to the 1994 Sun Microsystems concept video, Starfire. If you'd like to download the video in its entirety you can find it here.

See also:
Starfire (Part 1, 1994)
Starfire (Part 2, 1994)
Starfire (Part 3, 1994)
Starfire (Part 4, 1994)
Starfire (Part 5, 1994)
Starfire (Part 6, 1994)
Starfire (Part 7, 1994)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)

Starfire (Part 7, 1994)

Part 7 of the Starfire video shows the helmet-haired antagonist attempting to derail our heroine's brilliant business plan. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion.

See also:
Starfire (Part 1, 1994)
Starfire (Part 2, 1994)
Starfire (Part 3, 1994)
Starfire (Part 4, 1994)
Starfire (Part 5, 1994)
Starfire (Part 6, 1994)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)

Starfire (Part 6, 1994)

Part 6 of the Sun Microsystems video Starfire shows how a presentation can be prepared and presented (to floating heads).

I apologize for the glitchy video. Parts 7 and 8 should look much better.

See also:
Starfire (Part 1, 1994)
Starfire (Part 2, 1994)
Starfire (Part 3, 1994)
Starfire (Part 4, 1994)
Starfire (Part 5, 1994)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)

Starfire (Part 5, 1994)

Part 5 of the 1994 video Starfire gives us voyeurism, a subtle Jetsons reference and more video-phone technologies of the paleo-future.

See also:
Starfire (Part 1, 1994)
Starfire (Part 2, 1994)
Starfire (Part 3, 1994)
Starfire (Part 4, 1994)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)

Starfire (Part 4, 1994)

Part 4 of the Starfire video looks at the possibilities of media creation without shooting new scenes with new actors.

See also:
Starfire (Part 1, 1994)
Starfire (Part 2, 1994)
Starfire (Part 3, 1994)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)
Apple's Knowledge Navigator (1987)
Apple's Grey Flannel Navigator (1988)

Starfire (Part 3, 1994)

Part 3 of the Sun Microsystems video Starfire begins with our protagonist spying on the office receptionist. From there, we take a look at the scanning interface of the (paleo)future. Enjoy.

See also:
Starfire (Part 1, 1994)
Starfire (Part 2, 1994)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)
Apple's Knowledge Navigator (1987)
Apple's Grey Flannel Navigator (1988)

Starfire (Part 2, 1994)

Part 2 of the 1994 Sun Microsystems video Starfire contains remote manipulation of a camera via tablet. Pretty sweet.

See also:
Starfire (Part 1, 1994)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)
Apple's Knowledge Navigator (1987)
Apple's Grey Flannel Navigator (1988)

Starfire (Part 1, 1994)

With the annoucement of Microsoft Surface it seems like a great time to reflect on similar technologies projected in 1994 for the year 2004. Part one of the Sun Microsystems video Starfire sets the scene with an unfortunate reference to Princess Diana and then gives us a glimpse of the user interface to come.

There are eight parts to this video, so stay tuned.

See also:
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)
Apple's Knowledge Navigator (1987)
Apple's Grey Flannel Navigator (1988)
1999 A.D. (1967)
Online Shopping (1967)