Paleo-Future : Rewind and Fast Forward

Time to strap on your seatbelt and whoosh back into the past. Or travel into the future? Maybe, travel back into the past and look into the future? No, we aren’t telling you to become fortune tellers who gaze into a crystal ball to predict the oh-so-hazy-and-unknown destiny of people and things. But it is fun to know what the past thought the world would turn out to be many years after their time. Paleo-Future is a site that takes a look at how the past imagined the future to be. Beware: This site is so interesting that you could end up spending a lot of time here. Here’s a sneak peak into this site:

Project 2000 – Apple Computer (1988)

In 1987 Apple Computer held a competition called Project 2000. Apple asked student research teams to submit papers detailing what the computing technology of the year 2000 would look like. In early 1988 Steve Wozniak, Alvin Toffler and Ray Bradbury, among others, sat on the judge’s panel. The winning team was from the University of Illinois with their paper called Tablet: The Personal Computer of the Year 2000.

Our machine will have the same dimensions as a standard notebook. It will look like an 8″x11″ monolith from the movie 2001, and be reminiscent of the Dynabook. This rectangular slab will weigh but a few pounds, and have no buttons or knobs to play with. The front surface will be a touch-sensitive display screen and will blink to life upon touching two corners.

See more pictures here

Postcards Show the Year 2000 (circa 1900)

This post has a few postcards of what people imagined the year 2000 to be like. Postcards with people walking/strolling on water, moving pavements, house-moving by train, roofed cities, summer holidays at the north pole and many more. Click here to see them.