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A guy on this sub told me my cold takes were boring, so I went digging through a 1995 issue of Wired and found a doozy
About three weeks ago I posted a screenshot of that old Newsweek piece about how the internet would never replace newspapers and someone replied, fair enough, but that one gets posted here every other day. They told me to actually go find something nobody remembers instead of recycling the same five bad calls. So I hit the library archive in Fort Wayne on my lunch break and pulled the September 1995 issue of Wired, the one with the weird neon cover. Page 138 has a whole spread predicting that by 2005 we would all be doing our banking through our TVs using the remote, and it called the PC a fad for people who like sitting alone in the dark. There is a quote from some analyst who says nobody wants to type on a keyboard when they could just point and click at their television set. What makes it funny is that the same issue has an ad for a 28.8k modem for $199 that they call blazing fast. I took a photo of the page and I am posting it here because it genuinely made me laugh out loud in the copy room. Has anyone else gone to a physical archive for this stuff, or am I the only one who drives 20 minutes to a library to win an internet argument?
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hunt.rowan7d ago
The "point and click at their television set" line is killing me because my buddy Dave actually tried to live that dream. He bought one of those WebTV boxes in like 1998 and was convinced it was the future, sat there in his recliner pecking out emails with a remote like he was texting with oven mitts on. It took him 45 minutes to send one message to his sister and she called him on the landline to ask why he wrote "how are the kidS" with a random capital. The box ended up in his garage next to a Bowflex by 2000. I should text him a picture of that Wired page, he still gets mad about it.
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