The Future: A Retrospective

In May 2007 I found a book in a used bookstore called Future Stuff, by Malcom Abrams and Harriet Bernstein. It was published in 1989, and it described about 250 consumer products that:

...should be in your supermarket, hardware store, pharmacy, department store, or otherwise available by the year 2000.

It was based on interviews with the people who were working on these products. It made concrete predictions, with dates and estimated prices. The predictions were more or less wrong.

This is what happens when you predict the future. What I didn't expect was the sheer variety of ways in which the predictions were wrong. Most books of predictions I've seen come from the 1960s or earlier, and their predictions have no relationship to today's reality. But when I started looking up the technologies described in Future Stuff, I found that almost all of them do exist in some form or another.

Some of them exist more or less as described ("Flat TV"). Some exist more or less as described but nobody buys them ("Vending Machine French Fries"). Some are too expensive to be practical ("Privacy Windows"). Some were big hits in totally different fields than the ones they were marketed to ("Binocular Glasses", "Self-Stirring Saucepan"). Many exist in greatly improved form thanks to mobile phones ("Watch Pager") and the Internet ("Weather Cube", "The Guerilla Information Network")—two technologies that existed when Future Stuff was published, yet which don't seem to be mentioned at all.

Some achieved success by abandoning the high-tech trappings with which Future Stuff burdens them ("Telephone Smart Cards", "Solar Cooker"). Some made a fortune ("Impotency Pills") for someone other than the person mentioned in Future Stuff. Some failed because of tragic flaws ("Frozen Beverage Mug", "Non-Fattening Fat"), others for contingent reasons of history ("Digital Measuring Tape", "Self-Weeding Lawn"). Some remain pipe dreams today ("The Flying Car"). And some ("Mood Suit") were just ridiculous.

This website is a 2007 audit of 1989's future. I'll find what happened to the predicted products, and to the people and companies who were going to bring them to you. I'll dig up the appropriate patents and old articles about the products. My plan is to post one analysis per day, going through the book in sequence. You can keep up on changes by subscribing to the RSS feed.

All the amounts in Future Stuff are 1989 dollars. I give inflation-adjusted amounts for rough comparison, usually in 2007 (2006 actually, but who's counting) dollars. To keep things from getting too confusing, I qualify each amount of money with a year: $10/1989 is ten dollars in 1989 money, and it's worth about $16/2007. I'm indebted to The Inflation Calculator for making this information easy to access. One thing you'll see over and over again is a race between inflation and Moore's Law. Moore's Law wins big time.

Every item in Future Stuff has three pieces of information associated with it. I've reproduced them in a table for each item:

• How likely it is the product will get on the market. This seems taken directly from the people making the product. 100% means the product "exists in a form that can be marketed and sold"—not, importantly in retrospect, that it is or ever will be marketed or sold.
• When the product will be on the market. If the probability is 100%, the ETA is always 1990.
• How much the product will cost, in 1989 dollars. "N/A" means they don't think the product will be sold directly to consumers.

Part 1: Stuff You Wouldn't Believe!

• Levitation Vehicle
• The Water Battery
• Smart House
• Deodorant Underwear
• The Walking TV
• The Most Intelligent Toilet
• The Talking Glove
• Ultrasonic 3-D clothes
• The Walking Desk
• Mood Suit
• Virtual World
• Frozen Beverage Mug
• Hot/Cool Fabric
• The Flying Car

Part 2: Good Stuff in Small Packages

• Weather Cube
• Pocket Computer
• The Electric Train Attaché
• Flat Satellite Antenna
• Binocular Glasses
• Freeze-Dried Compressed Food
• Smart Pill Bottle
• Watch Pager