Living in the future

So here we are in the future. No shiny silver suits, levitating trains or gas turbine powered cars, but we're here nonetheless. How do I know? Because the things I see around me, and the things I do everyday are beyond any rational extrapolation of the things we had in my youth.

I remember in the early seventies at school having to write an essay as if I was looking back over 25 years - so I guess I was imagining looking back from the late nineties. I don't remember much of what I wrote, except I that I wrote that "motorways were the forgotten roads of the 1980s". This was because, at the time of the essay, there was an oil crisis going on (sparked by the Yom Kippur War of 1973), and I made the classic mistake of all futurologists, I assumed (rationally) that the future would be the same as the recent past, only more so. Oil was getting more expensive, it would obviously become unaffordable so there would be no car travel, therefore no need for motorways. What is really required for accurate futurology is to (irrationally)predict things that appear to be impossible!

I started in IT (it was called Data Processing in those days) in 1977. I wrote computer programs on a coding pad, with a pencil; then someone else made a deck of punched cards of the program and made a listing for me; I had a desk-top punch to make changes to the program (new lines of code, corrections, etc). Writing any program took weeks! (By the way, the diagonal line on the edge of the card deck was there so you could easily put the cards back in order when you dropped them).

The first mainframe I worked on in 1977 (an IBM S370/158) had 1.5MB of "main storage" (RAM to you), had one processor and boasted 28 x 317MB disks (that's what...8GB!).

I remember reading articles in the trade press saying that one day we would all have a computer on our desks. I had no idea out why you would want one on your desk for your own personal use -how would you use your own computer to do finance and stock control? (Ethernet and TCP/IP hadn't been invented).

It seemed irrational to want to have computer just for yourself, never mind the amount of personal computing power I now have at my disposal. My laptop (two CPUs, 320GB disk, 6 GB memory) would have run a FT-30 company (as the mainframe I worked on did). I also have a Kindle and an Android tablet (that guy’s only got 32GB memory – I bet there wasn’t that much electronic storage in the world in 1977!).  Now, I have about my person at any one time at least half-a-dozen devices that execute stored software programs – not to mention the computing rich environment that is my car or home! My phone has more processing power and storage than that IBM mainframe I worked on all those years ago. How could anyone except the fiction writers of “Star Trek” have imagined that?

Edison's Telephonoscope (transmits light as well as sound).
(Every evening, before going to bed, Pater- and Materfamilias set up an electric camera-obscura over their bedroom mantel-piece, and gladden their eyes with the sight of their children at the Antipodes, and converse gaily with them through the wire.).
Paterfamilias (in Wilton Place). "Beatrice, come closer, I want to whisper." Beatrice (from Ceylon). "Yes, Papa dear." Paterfamilias. "Who is that charming young lady playing on Charlie's side?"
Beatrice. "She's just come over from England, Papa. I'll introduce you to her as soon as the game's over?"

My favourite image of the future comes from this cartoon published in “Punch” in 1879 – another non-rational leap of imagination. It is a magnificent piece of futurology, predicting Skype at a time before there were moving pictures, sound recording, television or radio (the telephone had been invented in 1876). Of course, the cartoonist thought he was depicting something that was impossible – he was satirising the latest invention from Thomas Edison. When I worked in Paris in the early 1980s, I had a weekly, expensive telephone call home every week. When I worked in Australia in the 2000s, I had a Skype video call home every day, for nothing! What had been science fiction in 1984 was free only twenty years later!

The wildest thing of all, and the reason I really know I’m living in the future, is that this year I have been prompted to give serious thought to retirement. When I started work 38 years ago, being old enough (and wealthy enough) to retire was unimaginable. Now, what seems like a very short time later, I’ve worked out, if all things go to plan, that I could stop work when I’m sixty, only three years away! I don’t know whether I will stop then (many a slip twixt cup and lip), or continue – God willing, we shall see.