Date: 2010-02-14 14:20 Security: Public Tags: google, link Subject: Media projections from 10 years ago

Lately I've been looking at news articles from 9-10 years ago predicting what life would be like in 2010. There are some very interesting things, particularly as 10 years ago, neither 9/11 nor the Bush administration had happened yet. (Note: I'm not comparing one to the other; however, my point was that they were both significant events in the history of the world.)

Firstly, an article from December 2000 about the US national debt:

President Clinton announced new budget surplus numbers yesterday, saying the nation could be debt-free by 2010 - if the next President properly husbands the money.

The next President, of course, being George W. Bush. I think one look at the top graph on this image shows all that needs to be said on that matter. For those who can't see the image, it shows a steady rise in US debt since just after 1980, then starting to go down from 1996-2000, before making a sudden reversal at 2001 and showing that now the US has the highest debt it's ever had.

Another interesting article was a study made in 2001 by the European Commission about the methods people use to connect to the Internet. It tried to predict how common the various connection methods would be leading up to 2010. I made a poll in LiveJournal's polloftheday community to see how it fared; so far, it seems that pure fibre and and fibre hybrid methods are getting virtually no use at all, unlike the prediction. That said, only 62 people have responded to the poll so far, so more is needed before much can be said.

And according to TIME in an article from April 2001:

...the Space Transportation Association advises that the first tourist flights will leave the atmosphere in five years, holidaymakers will be in orbit by 2010, staying in space hotels by 2020 and sending kids to moon holiday camps by 2060.

Of course, we just got done killing the project to go back to the moon - not that that would have been for vacationing anyway. We have a long way to go before this is a reality.

And on March 29th, 2001, WashingtonPost.com's Live Online had a live discussion with two guests on the future of Internet telephony, including this gem:

Leslie Walker: What is going to happen to the traditional circuit-based telephone networks? In your view, how will they merge/coexist with the emerging Internet networks?

Tom Evslin: Witin ten years, we believe it will be gone. By 2010, the idea of a call that doesn't go over the Internet will be as starnge^[sic] as the idea of an email not on the Internet would be today. Vocie^[sic] over the Internet will replace the legacy PSTN both because of lower cost and much better functionality.

VoIP is definitely a lot more popular nowadays, but it certainly hasn't replaced PSTN - the system our regular phones are based on (also called POTS, for Plain Old Telephone System :D).

In case you're interested in more articles like these, check out this Google News Archive search. It uses Google to search news articles for the words "by 2010", and restricts it to 2000-2001, and to free-to-view articles only. The results are interesting!

If you find anything interesting, please comment with your findings - I'd love to hear your take on things.

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