1987 Predictions From Bill Gates: “Siri, Show Me Da Vinci Stuff”
The co-founder of Microsoft worried that, in the information age, people would prefer synthesized reality.
June 27, 2012 |
By Matt Novak
Surgery, Security and Sales: The Future of Closed-Circuit Television
Just as people were experimenting with the potential uses of broadcast TV in the 1930s, so too were they envisioning ways to utilize closed-circuit TV in the 1950s
June 26, 2012 |
By Matt Novak
Billboard Advertising in the City of Blade Runner
Are Angelenos destined to be perpetually surrounded by super-sized advertisements?
April 27, 2012 |
By Matt Novak
The Milkman’s Robot Helper
Could futuristic technology have saved the milkman from extinction?
March 28, 2012 |
By Matt Novak
Santa’s Trusty Robot Reindeer
A special visit from the Ghost of Christmas Retro-Future
December 23, 2011 |
By Matt Novak
The Fanciful, Chocolate-Filled World of 2012
In 1912, the French chocolate company Lombart printed a series of six collectible cards envisioning daily life one hundred years in the future.
December 19, 2011 |
By Matt Novak
A Whole Town Under One Roof
We're moving on up—visions of a self-contained community within a 1,000-foot tall skyscraper
November 18, 2011 |
By Matt Novak
Today at War, Tomorrow in Stores
Advertisers in the 1940s promised American consumers that they would be rewarded for their wartime sacrifices on the homefront
October 12, 2011 |
By Matt Novak
The Dinosaur Fossil Wars
Across the American West, legal battles over dinosaur fossils are on the rise as amateur prospectors make major finds
April 2009 |
By Donovan Webster
The Object at Hand
All but two of 104,960 sovereigns from a learned Englishman with no birthright were reminted here to fund the kind of institution he had in mind
May 1996 |
By Edwards Park

