An article in a 1965 edition of Eagle, a British comic book, predicted the arrival of the Internet with stunning accuracy, including services similar to Skype, Netflix, Kindle and Google years before the very first rudimentary ARPANET links were even established and decades before the first incarnation of the world wide web became available to the general public.
Even in the future, we still use magtape… but not the rotary-dial telephone.
Trying to distance himself from 1972, I remember GTA claimed that 1975 in Prophecy was written as a response to predictions of the future as in that magazine article (“we were not setting a date”). The way he ridiculed future “gadgets” gave me a twisted outlook on technological developments. Just imagine if Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs had become victims of such delusions.
Religion destroys curiosity and creativity. This is one of the reasons that the Armstrong churches are dying. Let us use the more popular term for them, Laodicean.
The cult was never questioned as to the failures of prophecy because the people infected with the “God Virus” trusted these ignorant fools without question. The horde who left after 1975 never materialized, saw Herbie and his minions in their true hidden form. Charlatans.
The kids in the current cult population carry on with the viral infection of Armstrongism (“vertically spread”) that they grew up with. These are the majority of the ACOG membership that can keep the religion relevant. At least for a time.
The children of these younger current members will for the most part, reject the religion and it will atrophy to the point of extinction in a generation, perhaps two. Why them? Information.
In the information age, all of us can prevent the infection from spreading further by the process of containment. The public needs to be protected.
More on the main page in a day.
Well, I for one am just happy that the writers of this article didn’t attempt to impose a weird, legalistic code of conduct, some dietary laws, financial imperatives, and standards for what should be matters of personal taste and choice on their readers. Quite honestly, now we have evidence that writers of comic books were more accurate than those whom we once thought to be apostles and prophets!
Back in the early ’60s, I remember a cartoon in Junior Scholastic. This was before hippies and all of that, so it depicted a clean cut kid in light jacket and Chinos, carrying a stack of school books, asking, “Hey, Dad, can I use the UNIVAC tonight?”
Yesterday, I was talking with a new customer about the early days of mass mailing. The fan-folded, paper address lists were generated on an IBM 360 (main frame) computer. It was a card system, and a keypunch operator had to manually type in the “holes” in each card that provided the computer with information for the central files. The computer room was climate-controlled, and had a false floor to conceal the wiring. Anyone from the outside who walked in was entering a totally foreign world, only known to a select group of highly specialized individuals. When I was an AC student, many of the students who had previously studied computer science at university wrote their notes from Bible Class on blank IBM cards. I mention all of this because that was the state of the computer industry at the time this comic book article was written.
Aren’t we all glad that Al Gore developed the algorithms which made the internet possible? (LOL!)
BB
Ever watch a video of Al Gore trying to dance? Awkward. He uses AlGorerythms.