You can check the actors and actresses here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6294456 1999 AD was a film created by Philco in 1967. It was intended to celebrate the company's 75th anniversary by showing how electronics were going to change how Americans would live in a short 32 years. Philco itself started off as a maker of carbon-arc lamps in 1892. After the turn of the twentieth century, they started making batteries for electric cars. Where Philco became most famous, however, was as a radio manufacturer. Philco was one of the top makers of radios during the 1930s and 40s. If you ever saw a radio in an old black-and-white movie of the era, chances are it was a Philco. I actually have a 1941 Philco radio that will pick up AM and Shortwave radio. Naturally it's all tubes on the inside, but it still works just fine. Philco did more than just radios. Philco went on to produce other electronic items such as car radios, TVs, refrigerators, air conditioners, electric washers, dryers, and deep freezes. The Philco brand was as common as GE, Sony, and LG are today for home electronics. Beyond home electronics, Philco produced electronics for NASA as well, including components for Project Mercury. A 1962 Philco computer ran in NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain defense until 1980. Philco was bought by Ford in 1961. Phillips Electronics purchased Philco from Ford in 1981, primarily for the name brand. By then Philco was pretty nonexistent as a big name brand, but they owned the Phillips trademark in the United States. Phillips occasionally uses the Philco name today for products and has licensed it out to other OEMs to produce TVs and digital TV converter boxes. This is a modern trend where companies having nothing to do with the original company trade off of an old-school name, much like the Westinghouse brand of TVs and monitors. More than computers in the future 1999 AD talked about other things in the future than just computing. It discussed things we'd recognize today as big screen plasma TVs, microwave ovens, and frozen food. Some of the things it didn't get right were the flying cars, modular homes, and the basic culture. ---------------- Many visionaries who tried to forecast what daily life would be like for future generations made the mistake of simply projecting existing technologies as being bigger, faster, and more powerful. They often failed to anticipate that future technologies might take very different forms, might be put to previously unconsidered uses, and might accompany (or even help bring about) significant social changes. The video clip shown above — an excerpt from a 1967 Philco-Ford production entitled "Year 1999 A.D.," — did a fairly good job of anticipating some ways (if not the specific forms) in which technology might be used in daily life more than three decades in the future. Concepts such as "fingertip shopping," an "electronic correspondence machine," and others envisioned in this video anticipate several innovations that became commonplace within a few years of 1999: e-commerce, webcams, online bill payment and tax filing, electronic funds transfers (EFT), home-based laser printers, and e-mail. As noted, although the technological concepts expressed in the video may be familiar to us, the specific forms used to realize them are somewhat different than their common modern implementations: The "fingertip shopping" the wife engages in imagines the shopper remotely controlling cameras placed in stores to scan merchandise rather than working with virtual representations of stores (i.e.websites). The "household monitor screen" isn't so much a webcam as it is a simple closed-circuit video security system. The bills and tax forms the husband works with are scanned images of paper forms rather than electronic forms. The "electronic correspondence machine" (e-mail) depends on the user's writing messages by hand with a pen and a stylus rather than typing them with a keyboard and monitor. The concepts are nonetheless relatively well-expressed, even if they don't quite match up with some of the finer points of modern technologies. However, the video exemplifies the common flaw of anticipating technological changes but not societal changes — the daily life it depicts is firmly rooted in the mid-20th century American model of women as stay-at-home child rearers and shoppers, and men as breadwinners and heads of household. Apparently women in 1999 still wouldn't be deemed to be up to handling tasks such as banking, bill-paying, and tax preparation, even with the help of electronic devices.

• published: 21 Apr 2015
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