Friday, March 21, 2008

You've Come a Long Way, Baby! OR Not All is What it Appears to be?

I must say, when I received the picture from a friend in 2004, I thought, "isn't it amazing that even scientists and visionaries in 1954 could not have predicted that in 2004 we would be wearing more computer power in our wrists and pocket devices!" So I filed the picture away. Today, I was about to delete the picture, but I decided to take a minute and check for any follow-up on this story. So I did a Google search on "Scientists from RAND corporation have created a model" and did find the truth.
The original story: Scientists from the RAND corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "Home Computer" could look like in the year 2004. However, the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the FORTRAN language, the computer will be easy to use.
Now for the true story, as far as you can trust the web:
["... tracked down Troels Eklund Andersen, a sales and tech support technician for a Danish hardware and software distributor, who originally entered the image in an online photo-manipulation contest. He took a photograph of a mock submarine maneuvering room and added a 1950s-era Crosley Ridgewood TV, a 1970s Teletype, a hardware store owner from Ohio and a pseudo scientific caption. "I wasn't intending to create a believable fake," he says."]
The moral of this story of course is... don't automatically believe everything you read on the internet, or for that matter on any medium. A little skepticism can be healthy; if it is too amazing or too good to be true, you can always verify.

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