A look back at our looks forward

I was reading an article on Wired magazine looking back at the intellectual successes of the now defunct company General Magic. The men who ran the company, Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, basically laid the conceptual groundwork for the Smartphone. Here’s General Magic’s original mission statement from 1990 taken from a November 1993 article on Wired:

We have a dream of improving the lives of many millions of people by means of small, intimate life support systems that people carry with them everywhere. These systems will help people to organize their lives, to communicate with other people, and to access information of all kinds. They will be simple to use, and come in a wide range of models to fit every budget, need, and taste. They will change the way people live and communicate.

I was reading this while absentmindedly looking at a text message on my Sprint Mogul, and the paragraph rang eerily familiar in my head.
This got me thinking about some other predictions of the future I had seen before; particularly the videos from the accompanying CD in Bill Gate’s 1995 book The Road Ahead.
I remember having read most of the book back in 95 at the impressionable age of 14 and particularly watching the videos of life in the not so distant future of 2004 and being absolutely blown away.  I saw the videos again today and was also quite impressed.

Sure the graphic design is very early 90s and some technologies (WebTV) fell through in favor of better thought out concepts (Hulu) but the main idea of an always-on society, constantly connected through various apparati all connected to an all-encompassing web, holds up incredibly well.

Still half-heartedly looking at the information coming through my phone, I realize that although we might not have the flying cars and moving sidewalks that were staples of older views of the future we have succeeded in creating an international network of infinite information that permeates the entire planet.

The future is now, we should be very proud of ourselves.

P.S. If you’re into past predictions of the future as much as I am, I seriously reccomend Matt-Novak’s Blog Paleo-Future