Surely we're not the only ones who feel bilked by all those visions of the future that turned out to be hideously and egregiously wrong. When we were kids, the year 2000 was supposed to be this high-tech utopia with everyone wearing matching shiny silver suits with the big "V" on the chest. The wheel would be a laughably primitive concept long gone from the culture's memory. The idea of sitting down to eat a meal of actual food would also be obsolete. Well, here we are in the year 2000, and what have we got? No flying cars, no meal-in-a-pill, and instead of silver V-chested suits we've got Old Navy Performance Fleece. What's up with that?

As it turns out, Apple's vision of the future was a lot closer than most people's. Fly on the Mac posted a cool eight-page Apple print ad from 1988, and while it's a retro kick reading about all of the great high-end features available in the Macs of the era (like hard disks-- "Apple offers six different models with up to 80 MB of storage"), the really spooky stuff is in the predictions for the future. For instance, under a photo of a CD-ROM drive that looks like it's roughly the size of a Buick sedan, Apple states: "CD-ROM is the future of information storage. And Apple has it now." Prescient, no? Only slightly less accurate is the copy about the Macintosh desktop: "Thousands of improvements later, the desktop still looks familiar. So if you learn one Macintosh, you've learned them all. Even those we haven't invented yet." Hey, it's true at least through today; we'll have to wait and see whether that applies to Mac OS X or not.

But here's where Apple got seriously Nostradamus on our heads: the last page of the ad is dedicated to the "Macintosh computer of the future." Apple didn't make any outlandish flying-cars-style predictions-- "It probably won't fit in your wallet, hover in mid-air or come when you call it." (Darn.) Instead, "it will likely bear a striking similarity to the Macintosh of today. Except it will let you do things you've never done before. Desktop video, for example. Imagine being able to create and edit multimedia presentations as elaborate as a Super Bowl halftime show without leaving your desk. We're working on it." Well, it took eleven years, but that sure sounds like iMovie to us.

Above that fateful prediction is a picture of "The Knowledge Navigator™," Apple's concept for a future Mac that features larger, more realistic icons (Aqua, anyone?), a live video image, and a window showing live news headlines from around the globe. Okay, so it also appears to be a sort of folding book with a built-in video camera-- plus it's beige, but hey, everyone's entitled to go a little Criswell now and again. And who's to say that future PowerBooks won't include a camera, fold right through the middle of the screen, and ship without a keyboard? That's the nice thing about the future-- it's always "coming soon."