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YangpaNemsay

Senior Member
cid_003a01c4ce7bb773b7d02202a8c0tony.jpg


-Popular Mechanics, 1954
 
it looks chopped but it could be real
 
you mean you guys' computers dont look like that? i need to upgrade
 
Originally posted by hcivic.com@Nov 21 2004, 08:28 PM
why would they have a fluid valve built into it?
[post=420175]Quoted post[/post]​


thats the mouse
 
Get some under-body neons and a wing on that baby... and we're ready to roll.
 
IF ANYONE is good at using photoshop, make a Type-R Version of the computer.

Racing Steering Wheel, Laptop replacing the keyboard, DVD Player replacing the Monitor, Reverse-Glow Gauges, Neons and Stickers
 
Here's a link to the old Popular Mechanics article from 1950 about the wonderous things that will be available in the year 2000. Not fake, either. :) Old and of course a repost, but still interesting:

Miracles you'll see in the next 50 years

What will the world be like in A.D. 2000? You can read the answer in your home, in the streets, in the trains and cars that carry you to your work, in the bargain basement of every department store. You don't realize what is happening because it is a piecemeal process. The jet-propelled plane is one piece, the latest insect killer is another. Thousands of such pieces are automatically dropping into their places to form the pattern of tomorrow's world.

The best way of visualizing the new world of A.D. 2000 is to introduce you to the Dobsons, who live in Tottenville, a hypothetical metropolitan suburb of 100,000. There are parks and playgrounds and green open spaces not only around detached houses but also around apartment houses. The heart of the town is the airport. Surrounding it are business houses, factories, and hotels. In concentric circles beyond these lie the residential districts.

Thanks to alloys, plastics, and other artificial materials, houses differ from those of our own time. The Dobson house has light metal walls only four inches thick. There is a sheet of insulating material an inch or two thick with a casing of sheet metal on both sides.

This Dobson air-conditioned house is not a prefabricated structure, though all its parts are mass-produced. Metal, sheets of plastic, and aerated clay (clay filled with bubbles so that it resembles petrified sponge) are cut to size on the spot. In the center of this eight-room house is a unit that contains all the utilities - air-conditioning apparatus, plumbing, bathrooms, showers, electric range, electric outlets. Around this central unit the house has been pieced together. Some of it is poured plastic - the floors, for instance. By 2000, wood, brick, and stone are ruled out because they are too expensive.

It is a cheap house. With all its furnishings, Joe Dobson paid only $5,000. for it. Though it is gale-proof and weatherproof, it is built to last only about 25 years. Nobody in 2000 sees any sense in building a house that will last a century.

Everything about the Dobson house is synthetic in the best chemical sense of the term. When Joe Dobson awakens in the morning he uses a depilatory. No soap or safety razor for him. It takes him no longer than a minute to apply the chemical, wipe it off with the bristles, and wash his face in plain water.

This Dobson house is not as highly mechanized as you may imagine, chiefly because of the progress made by the synthetic chemists. There are no dishwashing machines, for example, because dishes are thrown away after they have been used once, or rather put into a sink where they are dissolved by superheated water. Two dozen soluble plastic plates cost a dollar. They dissolve at about 250 degrees Fahrenheit, so that boiling-hot soup and stews can be served in them without inviting a catastrophe. The plastics are derived from such inexpensive raw materials as cottonseed gulls, out hulls, Jerusalem artichokes, fruit pits, soy beans, straw, and wood pulp.

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When Jane Dobson cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture (upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors - all are make of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic. After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber) Jane turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything. A detergent in the water dissolves any resistant dirt. Tablecloths and napkins are made of woven paper yarn so fine that the untutored eye mistakes it for linen. Jane Dobson throws soiled "linen" into the incinerator. Bed sheets are of more substantial stuff, but Jane Dobson has only to hang them up and wash them down with a hose when she puts the bedroom in order.

Cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old people. A few die-hards still broil a chicken or roast a leg of lamb, but the experts have developed ways of deep-freezing partially baked cuts of meat. Even soup and milk are delivered in the form of frozen bricks.

This expansion of the frozen-food industry and the changing gastronomic habits of the nation have made it necessary to install in every home the electronic industrial stove which came out of World War II. Jane Dobson has one of these electronic stoves. In eight seconds a half-grilled frozen steak is thawed; in two minutes more it is ready to serve. I never takes Jane Dobson more than half an hour to prepare what Tottenville considers an elaborate meal of several courses.

Some of the food that Jane Dobson buys is what we miscall "synthetic". In the middle of the twentieth century statisticians were predicting that the world would starve to death because the population was increasing more rapidly than the food supply. By 2000, a vast amount of research has been conducted to exploit principles that were embryonic in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Thus sawdust and wood pulp are table "linen" and rayon underwear are bought by chemical factories to be converted into candy.

Of course the Dobsons have a television set, but it is connected with the telephones as well as with the radio receiver, so that when Joe Dobson and a friend in a distant city talk over the telephone they also see each other. Businessmen have television conferences. Each man is surrounded by half a dozen television screens on which he sees those taking part in the discussion. Documents are held up for observation; samples of goods are displayed. In fact, Jane Dobson does much of her shopping by television. Department stores obligingly hold up for her inspection bolts of fabric or show her new styles of clothing.

By 2000, supersonic planes cover a thousand miles an hour, but the consumption of fuel is such that high fares have to be charged. In one of these supersonic planes the Atlantic is crossed in three hours. Nobody has yet circumnavigated the moon in a rocket space ship, but the idea is not laughed down.

Corporation presidents, bankers, ambassadors, and rich people in a hurry use the 1000-mile-an-hour rocket planes and think nothing of paying a fare of $5,000. between Chicago and Paris. The Dobsons take cheaper jet planes.

This extension of aerial transportation has had the effect of distributing the population. People find it more satisfactory to live in a suburb like Tottenville, if suburb it can be called, than in a metropolis like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. Cities have grown into regions, and it is sometimes hard to tell where one city ends and another begins. Instead of driving from Tottenville to California in their car - teardrop in shape and driven from the rear by a high-compression engine that burns cheap denatured alcohol - the Dobsons use the family helicopter, which is kept on the roof. The car is used chiefly for shopping and for journeys of not more than twenty miles.

The railways are just as necessary in 2000 as they are in 1950. They haul chiefly freight too heavy or too bulky for air cargo carriers. Passenger travel by rail is a mere trickle. Even commuters go to the city, a hundred miles away, in huge aerial busses that hold two hundred passengers. Hundreds of thousands make such journeys twice a day in their own helicopters.

Fast jet- and rocket-propelled mail planes made it so hard for telegraph companies all over the world to compete with the postal service that dormant facsimile-transmission systems had to be revived. It takes no more than a minute to transmit and receive in facsimile a five-page letter on paper of the usual business size. Cost? Five cents. In Tottenville the clerks in telegraph offices no longer print out illegible words. Everything is transmitted by photo- telegraphy exactly as it is written - illegible spelling, blots, smudges, and all. Mistakes are the sender's, never the telegraph company's.

When the Dobson's are sick they go to the doctor, in a hospital, where he has only to push a button to command all the assistance he needs.

In the middle of the twentieth century, doctors talked much of such antibiotics as penicillin, streptomycin, aureomycin and about fifty others that had been extracted from soil and other molds. It was the beginning of what was even then known as chemotherapy - cure by chemical means. By 2000, physicians have several hundred of these chemical agents at their command. Tuberculosis is all of its forms is cured as easily as pneumonia was cured at mid-century.

In that wonderful year, 2000, any marked departure from what Joe Dobson and his fellow citizens wear and eat and how they amuse themselves will arouse comment. If old Mrs. Underwood, who lives around the corner from the Dobsons and who was born in 1920, insists on sleeping under an old-fashioned comforter instead of a blanket of glass puffed with air so that it is as light as thistledown, she must expect people to talk about her "queerness". It is astonishing how easily the great majority of us fall into step with our neighbors. Some people dislike standardization, of course, but most of us could take a good deal of it in order to have a house like Joe Dobson's.
 
Then again, these predictions were made before the advent of the environmentalist movement.
 
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