Looking back it is amazing to see how far we have come in terms of technology, especially when you look at our vision of the future twenty or thirty years ago.  Many of the things we considered futuristic in the 80’s now not only exists, but is commonplace — like cell phones, for example.

Movies and other visual media often provided clues as to how we anticipated the future to be: Star Trek painted a picture of humans traveling through space, exploring, with a smorgasbord of cool gadgets; 2001: A Space Odyssey had a similar vision, but predicted communicating via video chat, browsing news on tablet-like computers, and artificial intelligence.

Another place where the future was brainstormed and visualized was commercials and other marketing tools of technology companies, such as Apple.  A great example of how the past predicted future developments is the following concept video from Apple in 1988.  To think that in just 20 short years, we have made the technology from this video mostly a reality is astounding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xp4aRpcX5So

Watching this video makes me wonder what companies are cooking up now, and where the future could possibly take us.  What’s next? Teleportation? Flying cars? Robot maids?  Seems to me like we’re just getting started.

By-line:

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.