The Magic Highway

"Meet George Jetson" Some of this stuff is true now.

http://tinyurl.com/btba5m

I remember seeing this as a kid. Amazing how accurate some of it is, and how loony some of it is!

That's not a very good future.

Fancy having to walk to your desk. Tut Tut,

The keypunch card that contained the family vacation itinerary brought back a memory from my childhood. My mom worked as a keypunch operator for a direct mail distributer. Pre computer age, the keypunch cards were used to store data such as mailing lists. They were similar to index cards but about 8" x 4". Information was stored on them by punching holes through the cards in patterns which could be interpreted by the keypunch machine which my mom operated. She would bring home outdated cards which she used as scratch pads for shopping lists and such and for me to draw and color on.

A better description of keypunch than mine from Wikipedia:

A keypunch is a device for manually entering data into punched cards by precisely punching holes at locations designated by the keys struck by the operator. Early keypunches were manual devices. Later keypunches were mechanized, often resembled a small desk, with a keyboard similar to a typewriter, and with hoppers for blank cards and stackers for punched cards. Some keypunch models could print at the top of columns, the character punched in each of those columns. The small pieces punched out by a keypunch fell into a chad box, or (at IBM) chip box, or bit bucket.

In many data processing facilities the punched cards were verified by keying the exact same data a second time and then checking to see if the second keying and the punched data were the same. There was a great demand for keypunch operators, usually women, who worked full-time on keypunch and verifier machines, often in large keypunch departments with dozens or hundreds of other operators.

I am still waiting for the flying car they promised me in 1962. It was supposed to be here by the year 2001, so far in the future.

Here ya' go, Steve

A real one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElS9BKSsezw

And a fake one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7f1feSjDks