[GUEST POST] Zack Mandell on Prophets of Tech
Zack Mandell is a movie enthusiast and owner of www.movieroomreviews.com and writer of movie reviews about movies such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He writes extensively about the movie industry for sites such as Gossip Center, Yahoo, NowPublic, and Helium.
I remember the days of the late 1990s. I would return home from class so I could get to doing work straightaway on my behemoth desktop that sometimes would make more noise than a 747. I would play my favorite music on the CD player that occupied its own little nest on my desk (Radiohead’s “OK Computer” was the music for a large part of those days). The first song would play as I was connecting with my dialup internet, and the words “You’ve got mail” would typically be announced in concurrence with the beginning notes of “Paranoid Android.” In 1998, the idea of having this music as a computer file akin to any of my WordPerfect documents was sheer lunacy. The same goes for internet that didn’t require me listening to the placing of a call before I could see my AOL home page. Now that high speed internet and Steve Jobs and his slew of convenient music devices have taken over the world, we take these technologies for granted, even though they were inconceivable some 15 years ago. It’s hard to predict the future; some have gone to jail for it (I’m looking at you Miss Cleo). Some film directors have tried their hand at it, and they’ve got actually gotten some things right. Here is a look at five classic science-fiction films, and how well they predicted the years they were portraying.
