Thursday, December 13, 2007

Non-archaeology Video archaeology post I came across the following yesterday:



It's called "Shopping in 1999 A.D." (which, we should note, ought to read "Shopping in A.D. 1999") and supposedly represents a 1960s imagining of a home computer system late in the century. As Snopes notes, it seems to be legit. They also do a pretty good analysis of it. I was really struck by how well they got things in general. There are differences, of course, as the Snopes folks point out. The "Online banking" seems to be more of a way to view paper documents, but the video also describes the actual paying of bills and such online. And no keyboards! That's what struck me. I couldn't tell how they navigated anywhere, except that a couple of button pushes seemed to get them everywhere. Also interesting was the flat screens; no CRTs which is mostly all that was around then (if not totally).