How did they know?

This is what people in 1966 thought computers would be like in the far future year of 1999 (see left for a photo of a computer in 1966.)
Amazingly accurate!
I like their idea of email, handwritten :)

Jules Vern's 1863 predictions from his book "Paris in the 20th Century" (shelved because his editor said it was too unbelievable):

"...The Casmodage Bank possessed veritable masterpieces of the genre, instruments which indeed did resemble huge pianos: by operating a sort of keyboard, sums were instantaneously produced, remainders, products, quotients, rules of proportion, calculations of amortization and of interest compounded for infinite periods and at all possible rates..." (from page 52)

"...the Casmodage Bank issued no less than three thousand letters a day, posted to every corner of the world. A fifteen-horsepower Lenoir never ceased copying these letters, which five-hundred employees incessantly fed into it."(from page 53)

"Further, photographic telegraphy, invented during the last century by Professor Giovanni Caselli of Florence, permitted transmission of the facsimile of any form of writing or illustration, whether manuscript or print, and letters of credit or contracts could now be signed at a distance of five thousand leagues..."(also from page 53)

"The telegraph network now covered the entire surface of the earth's continents and the depths of the seas; America was not more than a second away from Europe, and in a formal experiment made in London in 1903, two agents corresponded with each other after having caused their dispatches to circumnavigate the globe."

He was obviously a time traveler, right??

Conan o'brien's prediction:

"I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography."

ha ha