Back then, Apple wasn't the company that makes the sleek, sexy handheld devices you know today. They were all about primitive desktop computers and were just coming off from having booted Steve Jobs from the company (a desperate Apple would bring him back a decade later).

In the middle of all this, in an era when the World Wide Web was still years away and most people were still using rotary dial phones, Apple released this silly "technology of the FUTURE!" promotional video:

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"Why yes, Bill Nye, I would like to conquer Africa!"

They called the concept the Knowledge Navigator, and it appeared to be several steps ahead of anything they were using in Star Trek.

It was a flat, tablet-shaped computer that would have featured a fully automated digital assistant, a front-facing camera with video chat, a multi-touch interface and voice-based Internet search (remember, at the time there was no "Internet" for this thing to be surfing -- that also was pure fantasy in 1987). Oh, and it was also a telephone as well as an e-reader.

YouTube
"It will absolutely revolutionize the field of unsafe driving habits."

You already know how dead-on all of this was. Just check out Apple's recent iPhone commercial:

It turns out that when Apple has an idea, they run with it. Available technology be damned!

Here's Where It Gets Weird:

Not convinced yet? How about this:

If you pay close attention to the Knowledge Navigator video, you can see that the calendar says September 16, and the digital assistant mentions that a research paper was written "about five years ago" in 2006. That places this video on September 16, 2011. The new iPhone 4S with the Siri digital assistant -- the device that finally made everything you see there come true -- was released about two-and-a-half weeks after this video was to take place.

Wikipedia
2015 is only three years away. Ball's in your court, Mattel.

In the pilot episode, the character of Charles Russell appears in heaven with St. Peter, awaiting his eternal judgment. But before he makes his way up to the pearly gates, another man finds himself at St. Peter's mercy.

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What kind of God lets people take machine guns into the afterlife? The best kind.

That man is Colonel Moammar Gadhafi, and according to this show, he dies on July 29, 2011.

Here's Where It Gets Weird:

If something about that video clip is making you want to pull up Wikipedia to do some fact checking, we'll save you a trip: Gadhafi was killed on October 20, 2011. OK, we'll admit: It's not the same date this show said it would be. It's a whole three months before it actually happened. For a prediction made 24 years in advance.

The show only lasted half a season. Who knows what kinds of things Second Chance would have predicted correctly if it had been allowed to continue, considering that at least one member of the writing staff was a wizard?

Near the end of the sketch, he talks about the time O.J. Simpson stopped by to promote his new video entitled I Didn't Kill My Wife ... But If I Did, Here's How I'd Do It.

Here's Where It Gets Weird:

If I Did It; or, The Importance of Eyeballing Your Glove Size

The picture on the left is the joke video that Chris Rock had made for the skit. The book on the right, though, is the very real book by O.J. Simpson called If I Did It, about the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. The book was published in 2007, almost a decade later. O.J. even planned a video much like the one Rock had on his show -- a television special called O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened was planned but quickly canceled when everyone came to their collective right minds and put a stop to it.

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"Man, it sounded like such a good idea when O.J. first pitched it to us. He has such a compelling vision."

Now, we have to acknowledge the unthinkable: that O.J. saw the Chris Rock sketch and from that, got the idea to write the book. If so, it has to be the most gruesome example of life imitating art in history. We think we'd prefer to just fall back on our "one of the writers was a wizard" explanation again (they did have Louis C.K. on the staff, after all).

This was an era when personal computers were only used by a tiny percentage of hackers and hobbyists. They looked like this:

Sven Petersen
Back in those days, 64KB of RAM was worth at least a handy in the Denny's bathroom.

... and literally did not have enough horsepower to display that photo.

But Alan Kay, the chief scientist at Atari, got to wondering what computing might be like in the future. He contacted Glen Keane (who designed most of your favorite Disney characters) to illustrate his ideas.

First up, Kay came up with the idea of an "intelligent encyclopedia," a device that could bring up any information you needed right in the palm of your hand. OK, it makes sense that a guy living in an era when encyclopedias were huge sets of books that took up an entire shelf would imagine a future where all that could be shrunk down somehow. But he hardly stopped there ...

Here's Where It Gets Weird:

futureofthebook.org
"Mister, did John Hammond ever learn to not play God?"

What you're looking at is a group of kids on a field trip to a museum. Some seem to be holding what look like laptop computers, while other exhibits have touch screen computer devices below them. The idea here was that the children were using an intelligent encyclopedia to access information about dinosaurs, Wikipedia-style.

But you may also notice something else: None of those computers have wires. Back when making two computers talk to each other over cables was cutting edge technology only available to professionals, this visionary predicted that we would be using wireless Internet everywhere. Then Kay took that idea and ran with it, to a bunch of scenes that look eerily like your everyday life. Here's some kids playing a wireless multiplayer game:

futureofthebook.org
It's simulating a Mars landing, but the kid in the yellow shirt is pleasuring himself to hentai porn.

Here's a dad streaming the Beatles' Ed Sullivan performance with the touch of a button:

futureofthebook.org
Yes, it predicted that old people would use the technology in lame ways.

And here's a rich guy in first class checking his stock prices in mid-flight, though it doesn't seem to portray him having to pay $15 for it:

futureofthebook.org
"Stewardess? Can you have someone from coach come up and press this button for me?"

And look at this -- here's a bunch of people at a sports bar, the guys on the right following along with the football game with a computer that gives them real-time stats and other info:

futureofthebook.org
"How did we even enjoy sports before we knew what the players looked like naked?"

NFL fans may recognize that as the program NBC launched just two years ago for their Sunday night NFL games.

The only obvious omission in the illustrations is a bearded guy with a MacBook, tapping away at his novel at Starbucks.

It seems even he knew how bizarre some of the ideas were, so to save face, he prefaced the article with "These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible." But what did he care? It wasn't as if he was going to live to see any of it.

And sure, he had a lot of the standard sci-fi predictions -- he figured out that one day photos would be in color, and that homes would be climate-controlled with "hot and cold air from spigots" that you could use without a chimney. But then he started getting strangely specific ...

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"... and thine carrier pigeons shall fly with prodigious haste, but be limited to 140 letters to save weight."

Here's Where It Gets Weird:

So, keep in mind that this was an era when people were still getting around on horseback, and the fastest you could travel on land was in a train powered by coal that had to stop every few miles because there was a damsel tied to the tracks. So this guy, pulling the fact right out of his ass, said that in 100 years, America would have a train that could go 150 miles an hour.

Wikipedia
"And my errand boy, Keith Richards, will be a beloved musical icon and part-time mummy."

Almost 100 years to the day, Amtrak held its inaugural run of the high-speed Acela Express. It was the fastest train in the USA and had a top speed of exactly 150 miles an hour.

Mackensen
"... and those damsels will just explode when you hit them."

He also foretold that Americans would be taller than the average in 1900 (which was about 67 inches) by "one to two inches." By 2000, the average had grown by 2 inches.

Then he said that if there were a war in China, you would be able to read about it an hour later (this was when the standard time for news to travel from China to the U.S. was about a week, and papers took a hell of a lot longer than an hour to typeset and print). He went on to surmise that man would see and speak around the world with wireless cameras, telephones and radios, and that photos would be "telegraphed" instantly from any distance.

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He also predicted that at least 80 percent of those photos would be of dudes' junk.

Well, all right, they had some form of instant communication back then, so maybe he was just taking it into a logical future. But then he predicted that certain letters would be eliminated from written English, because eventually an impatient society would come up with a more efficient way of typing that simply mimicked the sound of speech. You know, like if instead of typing "You're too fat," it would become "ur 2 fat lol."

So while we didn't do everything he predicted (we didn't eliminate mosquitoes or learn to grow strawberries the size of your head), we are working on the LOLspeak. Good job, society.

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"That's enough trailblazing for one generation."

Erik Germ writes stuff over at HugeFrigginArms.com, where he also makes videos and cartoons. It would be awesome if you followed him on Twitter.

For more folks that might need a good burnin' at the stake, check out 7 Completely Unrealistic Movie Plots (That Came True) and 8 Badass Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True In Lame-Ass Ways.

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out Why The Flintstones Takes Place in a Post-Apocalyptic Future

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