We're living in the 1950s here

From Jenn Manley Lee. The Future!

You know what this is, don't you? It's a home computer. A PC as envisioned in 1954. The photo's from an old issue of Popular Mechanics.

Jenn notes that the caption reads:

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and Fotran language, the computer will be easy to use.

Fortran! I wonder if they thought home computers would still need punch cards too.

I love stuff like this. I grew up with it. My grandfather and my father both worked at General Electric, and all my ideas of what science and sceintists at work look like are based on visits I made to their offices and labs when I was a little kid.

This is my grandfather. He worked in the metallurgy department.

This picture appeared in the GE company newsletter in about 1935. The caption read "Meet the Dilatometer."  He died before I ever saw this picture so I never got to ask him what the Dilatometer did.

And here's my father. Now these guys are scientists!

Pop Mannion is the short guy in the middle with his hand on the trophy. I get a kick out of the fact that he had just enough vanity at the time to take off his black plastic frame glasses for the picture.

They're not celebrating any scientific breakthroughs here. The 14-0 on the blackboard behind them is not some stray mathematical shorthand.  These guys are the department's softball team, The Dragons, and they've just won the company softball league championship, having gone 14 and 0 for the season. Pop was the manager and third baseman. Good glove, no power.

Since my grandfather retired in 1970 and my father left GE to go into academia around the same time, my visions of the future are frozen in the 1960s, when people had a much more optimistic and poetic view of what the Future would look like. Back then people thought that the Future would include lots of big machines doing amazing things. It's turned out that the future is all about lots of very small machines helping us do things we could already do only a whole lot faster.

So that's why I sometimes feel like Jerry and George at the beginning of an episode of Seinfeld where they're complaining that the end of the 20th Century doesn't look at all like they'd been told it would look when they were kids.

George wants to know, "Where are the flying cars?  Where are the bubble cities?"

Jerry feels equally gypped.

"Yeah," he says, aggreivedly, "We're living in the 1950s here!"

Exactly.

Update: Darn! Darn, darn, darn, darn, DARN!  The picture of the "home computer" is a fake. See here. The give away---besides the floating television and the steering wheel---should have been the caption's claiming that the computer would run on Fortran, In 1954 people in the field would have predicted that future computers would run some version of assembler.  Fortran was brand new in 1954.  It was run successfully for the first time in September of '54 but wasn't widely used until 1957, according to Milestones in Computer Science and Information Technology by a former third baseman at General Electric's Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory.

The pictures of my grandfather and father are real, as far as I know.

Comments

[mac macgillicuddy]

This gives me the opportunity to post this link to one of the most confounding and intriguing mathematical puzzles of the 21st Century.

Now THIS is the future!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/viewpoints.html

Interview with Witten is especially interesting.

See you in the ninth dimension!

[mac macgillicuddy]

PS--My 7-year-old son watched the NOVA episode examining string theory and explained it to me. Now THAT really is the future (I couldn't program the VCR either, and I gave up on that long ago).

[mrs. norman maine]

Yeah, that top photo did have kind of a Desk Set vibe, but only after you pointed it out. Related note:

http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/heroes_and_villains.php

[Jennifer]

"Meet the Dilatometer." I believe I did indeed meet the Dilatometer and it was involved in the birth of my first child...