The race to invent a computer as fast as the human brain has accelerated with the U.S. government’s pledge to beat the Chinese Tianhe-2 industrial super computer with a machine about 30-times faster by 2025.
It’s a bold claim. But what about techology claims of decades past? POLITICO found itself thinking about how far tech gadgets have come since the 1950s, and for a reality-check looked at TV ads for cutting-edge products in their day (flashback brought to you by YouTube).
1) AOL: LOL
You have tickets to a soccer game, but don’t think you can make it because you’ve got to get a birthday present for mom, buy airline tickets and take your child to the library. Don’t worry, it’s 1995 and you have America Online. You can get all of your chores done and even update your stock portfolio before the kickoff.
2) #Math
Remember calculators? For those born this century, they’re an app that does math from the olden times. My dad tells me that back in the day, a fancy calculator was both useful and fashionable. That day was the early 1970s, when the world’s smallest electronic calculator, the Sharp LC8, was the size of a small house-brick and cost $345. For those playing along at home, that’s over $2,200 in today’s money.
3) Siriously smooth talking
Before Siri, there was IBM’s experimental voice recognition system. The system could recognize a “business vocabulary of thousands of words.” Of course, it wasn’t until 1992 that IBM actually released the IBM Speech Server Series, and even then, it didn’t exactly set the world on fire. But hey, it did know the difference between “write,” “wright,” and “right.”
4) Now THIS is a smart watch
Speaking of devices ahead of their time, Casio captured the imagination in 1986 with its Databank Watch (and its mysterious friend the Data Cal calculator, which for some reason stored phone numbers as well as equations). It was marketed to the husband who is always forgetting his phone number and wedding anniversary. Oh Walter, you hapless sod, Casio has your back.
5) Zero marks for Xerox
Now here’s a secretary who won’t take dictation, sharpen pencils or file. Why does her boss find her indispensable? That would be because she can push buttons and turn knobs. On her Xerox copier. Boom, tish, folks, this was as good as it got in the 1960s.
6) 128k of awesome
Remember a time when an Apple Macintosh was half the price of computers that were half as powerful? I don’t. But it was only back in the mid-80s when the cutting edge was a 32-bit microprocessor and a mainframe took up a board 10-square inches.
7) A Walk(man) to remember
Hey ladies: it’s 1984, you want to do aerobics but all those large cassette players are weighing you down. Luckily, the Super Walkman from Sony (“the world’s smallest cassette player,” as in tape) helps you lose inches off your waistline while still getting sick disco beats through your headphones.
8) They have an award for what?
Back in 1951, when leading TV stars like Ruth Hussey (the Miley Cyrus of her time) to Edward Arnold (maybe a Justin Bieber type?) and Loraine Day (last century’s Tina Fey?) were all endorsing Motorola, the only television cabinet design to win the Fashion Academy Award for beauty. (Dealers accepted trade-ins for TVs and radios and offered 65-week payment plans after a small down-payment.)
9) With Friends like these…
Maybe less advertisement and more questionable infotainment, but we couldn’t resist Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston in “the world’s first cyber-sitcom” on how to use the Windows 95 operating system.
Bonus clip
Ever wondered what those crazy hippies and cool cats of the 1960s thought the future would bring? Wait no more. In 1966 (or thereabouts), Philco-Ford Corp. imagined the year 1999, where mom (who said she was too old at 44 to understand how computers work) can order any item of clothing she likes from the comfort of her home on her computer console, and dad (45, an astrophysicist working on the colonization of Mars) instantly gets the bill and pays it from his.