#late retrofuture

[oldschoolsciencefiction]

r/RetroFuturism - 1985 Sinclair C5 electric vehicle

188 votes and 22 comments so far on Reddit

In the waning days of the Retrofuture, the hoped for jetpacks and flying cars had given way to...this. The Sinclair C5 was little more than a short-range electric tricycle that could attain a less than impressive 15 miles per hour top speed.

This Reagan-Thatcher Era proto-Segway was created by English entrepreneur and inventor Sir Clive Sinclair and was an instantaneous commercial flop. The vehicle later developed a small cult following with some C5 enthusiasts substantially “modding” their C5s.

[oldschoolsciencefiction]

Okay, Retrofuture 1962, show me your City of Tomorrow! What have we got? Flat-roofed houses on which to land the old VTOL flying car? Hotels with robot bartenders that can mix the perfect martini? Naturally, there has to be an obligatory monorail somewhere. Does the local spaceport have a storage locker for my jetpack or do I...uh...hang on a minute...

Land Development? Shopping Centers? CO-OP Housing? Industrial Parks? That’s your City of Tomorrow?!

Shame on you, Retrofuture. Somewhere, the 1939 New York World’s Fair is shaking its head in disgust.

[oldschoolsciencefiction]

Look at this late-Retrofuture domestic concept: the “Kitchen Satellite”. The design is by Luigi Colani, a man with an Italian-sounding name who is a German of Kurdish descent.

As an industrial designer, Colani knew what the public wanted in a kitchen: terrifically cramped, orange, plastic, and spherical. Inexplicably, this didn’t catch on.

I bet there’s a tiny cabinet in there somewhere with a canister of Tang.

[oldschoolsciencefiction]

Tired of the drudgery of lugging out that three pound cookbook you bought for $2.50? The Late Retrofuture has you covered with this 100 pound Honeywell H316 kitchen computer. For the paltry sum of $10,000 -- close to $80,000 in 2017 dollars -- you can have the Kitchen of the Future. Just take the two week course that teaches you how to input data using toggle switches -- I'm not making this up -- and you can kiss that cheap and practical cookbook goodbye.

[oldschoolsciencefiction]

...if it had nonfunctional arms and an Atari 400 computer from 1979 as a CPU.

We said “One idea” not “a good idea”.

[oldschoolsciencefiction]

Bryce Lynch, Max Headroom, and Edison Carter are 20 Minutes Into The Future on “Max Headroom”.

This show was greatly underrated and way ahead of its time.