Computers & Gadgets

I can remember it like it was yesterday, it’s a beautiful spring day in 1993 and I was sitting in my third grade classroom. We got children’s science magazines and discussing all the superb devices within that were due in, THE FUTURE! Bigger computers, smaller computers ( and even cheaper ones ), cameras with little screens that showed the photo you snapped, dynamic games systems with-wait for it….16 BITS! Whatever those are! The one thing that truly stuck with me though, was the automatic automobile. It had something similar to a GPS built in, where you would program in coordinates and the automobile would follow those directions. How it might sense other autos, traffic lights, and stop signs, I don’t have any idea and it definitely did not cross my mind at the time. The automobile was supposed to start on it’s own and drive to your destination, essentially chaffering you. And for some reason there would be a microwave in the dashboard. At the end of the description was the sentence, Even a seven years old would be able to drive! Why, I was seven! That meant when this car came out in the future, I might be able to get one! Elated, I awaited the day my fabulous automatic car would roll off the line. And waited, and waited and here I’m seventeen years on and the closest thing to an automatic auto is a strip of highway in japan that utilises magnets to pull your automobile.

I do not get it. I am not now in THE FUTURE, where’s all the hi-tech stuff?

Companies have been advertising all the awesome things they’ll be putting out in THE FUTURE since their inception, yet perhaps only 1% of them ever reach the general public. More if they are heavily reworked. Why advertise something and promise to the general public, but then not deliver? Duke Nuk’em for good anyone? In fact , the self driving automobile has promised to the general public as far back as 1939.

Im actually undecided what to think about it, I am able to understand getting truly actually excited about a project just to have it not pan out. But it’s’s been over 80 years-where’s my goddamn car?! There are such a lot of futuristic devices and products that haven’t ever been released, that there are entire blogs dedicated to all the wacky things we should have owned. Or that we probably did manage to possess, but the product turned out to suck such a lot that the company went under. A nice example of this were ‘videophones’, literally phones with a small screen showing you the individual you were speaking to, and have actually existed since the sixties. Obviously their extremely high price and dreadful visual quality have lead them to be almost non-existent.

One phonephone product advertised but we sadly failed to see was the ATT wrist phonephone in 1993, or really all versions of the wrist phone. I suppose consumers finally did not want to look like secret agents infrequently mumbling into their sleeves. I think we’ll be more at ease with that on our space resort being handed a mimosa by our robot house maid. Right before we food down on our DNA knowledge pill and duplicated food ( Hopefully MIT will perfect that ‘Cornucopia:Digital Gastronomy project shortly ).

Then again, they could just show up in different forms. Scientists have been attempting to create a safe exaggerate since the sixties. Last year we saw the appearance of E-Cigs, all 300 or so brands. Or they may develop, like cd’s into minidisks and minidisks into trash. I do not know, we probably won’t have underwater towns or a device we walk into that gives us a bath in a beam anytime soon…Or ever. More than anything, I just desire my automatic car. Then turn that auto into a time-traveling car.

Then go back to 1993 and give my seven years old self that automatic auto, therefore causing an ambiguity that will at last untangle time and implode the universe.

But damn it, I may have that automatic vehicle.

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