By Tom Dare
A 1960S VIDEO explaining how the internet would benefit people in the future has resurfaced this week, with predictions not too far off the reality we see today except for equality between the sexes.
The film, created in 1967 to give the public a glimpse into what technology could bring in the future, centres around a husband and wife, with the wife at home on her computer and the husband at work on his.
The narrator explains how, in the future, women will be able to shop online at the click of a button, with their husband able to see and approve any purchases from their own computer at work.
Despite the sexist undertones of having a man at work and a woman spending the money at home, the predictions of how technology will operate in the future are scarily accurate for a film that was produced nearly fifty years ago.
“Fingertip shopping will be one of the many homemaker’s conveniences,” the narrator explains.
“This video console will be channelled into the store of her choice. There, a camera will scan a display of wears which she will select by push-button.
“What the wife selects on her console will be paid for by the husband at his counterpart console. All bills and transactions will be carried out electronically.”
The film also shows a monitor which connects to a camera that allows the woman to keep an eye on her children from the comfort of her computer.
While it was certainly ahead of its time, the film was a reflection of the blistering pace with which technology was advancing in the 1960s.
Just two years before the film was produced the first commercially successful minicomputer, the PDP-8, had been released onto the market. While still extortionately expensive, roughly the equivalent of $130,000 in today’s money, the release of the console had given people a small insight into what the future might hold for technology in the home.