The Future--Sixties Style

Yesterday I tried fixing my friend Brian's computer. A good deal of malware and spyware had gotten on the machine. The end result of this is that Explorer was constantly crashing. He could not go online. He could not even install AOL. I finally gave up and just decided it might be best if he did a reinstall...

That brings me to the thought that when I was a kid, I never even concieved that there would be such a thing as the World Wide Web. In fact, I didn't even think that we would have computers in most homes by the year 2004. As a child, computers were fairly large things that took up the better part of a room. And only the government, big corporations, and universities had them. But then, I suppose that when I was 7 years old I didn't hear that someone had invented something called a microchip...

Of course, I also thought that we would have a colony on the moon and a space station. I also thought that by this time, space travel was routine. It seems I was wrong. But then, it also seems that a lot of people more or less thought the same thing. Both the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the TV series Space: 1999 featured a moon base. I was only a year old at the time, but I have read about General Electric's Futurama at the 1964-1965 World's Fair in New York City. It not only included a colony on the moon, but a city under the sea.

It is strange how things turn out. As a child I thought we would have colonies on the moon, but I didn't think we would have home computers. We have not even been back to the moon since 1972 and now most homes have computers. It makes me wonder what the next 40 years hold in store.