How the Times predicted the World Wide Web in 1968
International Computers' predictions for Britain's digital development
Hindsight can be very unfair.
The above graph - from a 1968 article in The Times - shows the predictions made by one UK computer company about when the nation would hit certain milestones along the way to its bright, digital future.
There are, predictably enough, a few clangers. International Computers Limited (ICL) foresaw a ‘national data bank with central record of the whole population’ as being in place by, at the very latest, the late 80s. (The current Labour Government first proposed the National ID card scheme in 2001; the Conservatives have said they will ditch the scheme if they are voted in next year.)
Cheques, too, are still with us. (They might not be as prevalent as they were, but we’re by no means ‘chequeless’, as ICL said we would be by 2002.) The country’s first searchable database of patents, meanwhile, only came into existence in 1998 - some 10-15 years after predicted.
There’s one stunning projection, though - showing ICL to be as perspicacious as one could have hoped to be in 1968.
At no. 7, they write: ‘1 in 100 homes with terminal to information service computer’. You could happily substitute ‘terminal to information service computer’ with ‘internet’ there.
This service, they said, would be in 1 per cent of homes by the late Nineties, which is pretty much spot on. (Ofcom’s latest report suggests 73 per cent of British households use the internet in some form or other.)
As for ‘Computer control of London underground’, who knows what they meant exactly. Last time we used the tube, though, there were still drivers.
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