The future from the past is always an easy target, and this one, 2008 as seen from 1968, is dedicated to James Bow who, last I checked, is still awaiting his promised flying car. One thing they got right, and they got quite a few, is the insane inane immediacy we attach to cellular business communications:

Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate%u2019s office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device. He wishes you good luck at the coming meeting and signs off.
[ What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008? ]

Fast forward half the distance, twenty years later, 1988, we're in a conference room at Cognos, assembled to see a new video from Hewlitt Packard about the 'near' future of digital business communications. The scenario is someone again mobile, but in an ordinary limo en route to the 'important' presentation when they realize their data is incomplete.

They call a colleague who's doing the MI2 Tom Cruise thing up some rocky cliff in Colorado; he acks a "Roger!" on that and, now at the crest off the climb, calls in his coworker in Oz at her luxury home-office condo in Sydney. She's got the latest numbers and while on this three-way video conference call, whips up a new spreadsheet, re-graphs the data and submits a change that self-inserts into the limo-borne laptop presentation-manager just in time to pull up at the destination's parkaid.

Three minutes flat - they thank and congratulate each other and sign off on the call. The screens go black for a moment, then show the Bell-AT&T logo beside the message

"Total Charges for this Call: $98."

In 1988, that brought a howl of laughter from the screening room audience. Here in 2008 tho, we're not laughing any more.