Happy Back to the Future Day! We May Not Have Hoverboards, But We've Got Really Fast Internet

backtothefuture

It’s Back to the Future Day! In Back to the Future Part II, our hero Marty McFly transports to the future – specifically to October 21st, 2015 – to save his children and stop his nemesis Biff Tannen from permanently disrupting the space-time continuum. This after he saved his parents and thus himself in Back to the Future Part I by going back in time to 1955 and basically inventing rock and roll. Shudder to think what would happen if Marty McFly had never been born or even worse, if Biff Tannen were allowed to profit off of an out-of-time sports almanac.

Like all science fiction, part of the fun in BTTF was imagining what life might be like in the impossibly distant 2015. Director Robert Zemeckis pinned a vision of flying cars, double ties, and dehydrated pizza. No solutions on the challenge of hauling manure in an open-air truck bed. Oh well.

Zemeckis’ vision was a little ambitious. Like the rest of the red-blooded American children of the 80s, I’m still waiting patiently for my hoverboard. But for everything he over-estimated, there are dozens that are far more fantastic and futuristic in the real 2015 than Zemeckis ever could have imagined. Namely, television and the Internet.

In 1985, there was no broadband. There was no world wide web for that matter. There were dial up modems and some early ISPs were in service, but there was basically no content. Early adopters included large newspapers like The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times who offered online versions of their papers, but for the most part it was a way to share data and email. Today, nearly every American has access to a wired or wireless Internet connection. Handheld devices are more powerful than the mainframe computers of 1985, not to mention the supercomputers needed to run a hologram sharks in an imagined 2015. Oh, and the early Internet topped out at 300-baud, or about 300 bits per second. Today’s top residential cable broadband speeds now reach 2 Gigabits per second, or about two billion bits per second.

And how about TV in 1985? Pay TV services had been in business for a while, but in 1985, depending on where you lived, you could get about 50 low-definition channels. But today we count over 800 networks, DVRs, and on demand services that allow us to watch programming wherever we want, whenever we want. Today’s Marty McFlys aren’t cowering in corners, they’re creating YouTube videos that are getting millions of views and generating millions of dollars.

To really put in perspective how far off-base Zemeckis’ vision of future communications technology was in the 1980s, see one of my favorite scenes from Back to the Future Part II: Marty McFly getting fired with the highest technology imaginable in 1985, a fax machine.

But you’ve got to hand it to Zemeckis on the video chat thing. He got that right.