Ahead Of It's Time

[Exterminate]

One thing I really like about this story is how advanced it must have been for it's time. It's easy to watch it now and overlook the fact because it could and has been written a hundred times in more recent years in various forms, but in a time when computers were relatively new and definitely not commonplace I think it was a brave story to tell and must have felt quite creepy at the time.

[Aneurin]

There's a line in the story by one of the characters where they say how it's about ten years ahead of it's time. Always makes me laugh. I wonder if they actually expected to have crazy supercomputers by 1976

[Twisted-Sister]

It was definitely ahead of it's time, but I think it's a point that's probably more evident to people who were alive then and can make comparisons. I wasn't born then and it seems cool to me but I imagine to look back at it now and know just how much of a difference there was etc really hammers home the accuracy of some of the stuff in it.

[Nyki]

That was pretty much what computers would have looked like at the time, but they were a lot less powerful.  The NASA computer that coordinated the moon-landing in 1969 is supposed to have had about the same computing capacity as a modern pocket calculator.

Really, no-one knew how computers would develop, but generally SF overestimated in some ways and underestimated in others.  HAL in 2001 (which was released two years later) was an overestimation too, but on the other hand the idea of modern PCs would have seemed very implausible back then.

[Scott]

I think at the time it probably felt pretty out-there and futuristic but I don't think anyone realistically expected this thing to happen within the next few years or even half a century.

[Nyki]

I think at the time it probably felt pretty out-there and futuristic but I don't think anyone realistically expected this thing to happen within the next few years or even half a century.

I don't know.  The expectations of scientific progress at the time were fairly extreme - it was generally assumed we'd be zooming off to other star systems by the end of the century, so this might not have seemed so over the top.

[Saber]

We aren't really that far off anyway. As far as I know there are no computers plotting to take over the world but we can interact with computers by touch and voice and they have those servant robots in Japan and things like that. It's not something we're a million miles from.

[Nyki]

Though, again, by the 90s everyone was going to have their household robot.  Mine got lost in shipping.

[Vampyros Adric]

Where's my Jetpack? My meal in a pill and my silver suit? I do feel cheated by 60s / 70s Science Fiction!

[Peri-Peri]

I think at the time it would have been so easy to play on peoples fears in regards to computers. They were new and they were becoming more widespread (though nothing compared to now, obviously) and they were to all intents and purposes an artificial intelligence. Convincing people, especially kids, that they would rise up and take over must have been a brilliant story to play with.

[Tardis-Console]

Technology frightens me now, especially robots and machines that talk, so I think if I had watched this as a kid in the 60's I'd have spent the rest of childhood as a paranoid wreck.

[Roranicus]

Technology frightens me now, especially robots and machines that talk, so I think if I had watched this as a kid in the 60's I'd have spent the rest of childhood as a paranoid wreck.