Back in the late 1960s, an amazingly accurate, (and unintentionally hilarious) video titled 'Telecommunications Services for the 1990s' was produced in the UK by its Post Office Research Station at a place called Dollis Hill. The eight-minute video, (go ahead and watch, you can spare the time), offers a vision of a future world where every house is connected to a central data service, video calling is simple, easy, and inexpensive, businesses and consumers will access things like bank statements from their own computers.
And the nature of work, with all these advances in technology, will change dramatically, In fact, 'Given all these facilities, the businessman will scarcely need to go to his office at all. He can do all his work in the comfort of his own home.'
Check out the video below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), then come back to see the list of everything the post office folks got right:
So what did they correctly predict would be coming?
High-speed internet connections to every home and business
Worldwide video calling, (essentially Skype)
Pagers
Fax machines
A crude form of Web Conferencing/Screen Sharing
Online banking
Online mortgage calculators
Widespread remote working enabled by technology.
Pretty amazing, wouldn't you say?
Hope you had a laugh with this one, and have a great weekend!