What was predicted in the year 2000

If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later This showed major foresight, says Mr Nilsson. When Watkins was making his predictions, it would have taken a week for a picture of something happening in China to make its way into Western papers. People thought photography itself was a miracle, and colour photography was very experimental, he says.

The rising height of Americans. Watkins had unerring accuracy here, says Mr Nilsson - the average American man in was about ins 1. Today, it's Mobile phones. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn.

International phone calls were unheard of in Watkins' day. It was another 15 years before the first call was made, by Alexander Bell, even from one coast of the US to the other. The idea of wireless telephony was truly revolutionary. Pre-prepared meals. The proliferation of ready meals in supermarkets and takeaway shops in High Streets suggests that Watkins was right, although he envisaged the meals would be delivered on plates which would be returned to the cooking establishments to be washed.

Slowing population growth. The figure is too high, says Nilsson, but at least Watkins was guessing in the right direction. If the US population had grown by the same rate it did between and , it would have exceeded 1 billion in Hothouse vegetables.

Winter will be turned into summer and night into day by the farmer, said Watkins, with electric wires under the soil and large gardens under glass. This lists the logos of programs or partners of NG Education which have provided or contributed the content on this page. Powered by. The Y2K bug was a computer flaw , or bug, that may have caused problems when dealing with dates beyond December 31, The flaw, faced by computer programmers and users all over the world on January 1, , is also known as the "millennium bug.

So, Y2K stands for Year Many skeptics believe it was barely a problem at all. When complicated computer programs were being written during the s through the s, computer engineer s used a two-digit code for the year. The "19" was left out. Instead of a date reading , it read Engineers shortened the date because data storage in computers was costly and took up a lot of space. As the year approached, computer programmers realized that computers might not interpret 00 as , but as Activities that were programmed on a daily or yearly basis would be damaged or flawed.

As December 31, , turned into January 1, , computers might interpret December 31, , turning into January 1, Banks, which calculate interest rate s on a daily basis, faced real problems. Interest rates are the amount of money a lender, such as a bank, charges a customer, such as an individual or business, for a loan.

Instead of the rate of interest for one day, the computer would calculate a rate of interest for minus almost years! Centers of technology, such as power plant s, were also threatened by the Y2K bug.

Power plants depend on routine computer maintenance for safety checks, such as water pressure or radiation levels. Not having the correct date would throw off these calculations and possibly put nearby residents at risk. Transportation also depends on the correct time and date. Airlines in particular were put at risk, as computers with records of all scheduled flights would be threatenedafter all, there were very few airline flights in Y2K was both a software and hardware problem. My prediction remains as it always has: The fastest Web sites, regardless of end-user bandwidth, will be the most successful.

When I think of the things I do online -- manage my portfolio, buy plane tickets, use a search engine -- I'm looking for a page loading experience of under one second. It should be as fast as the applications I use on my desktop, regardless of branding, advertising, and interface.

So there's a broadband challenge. Yes, many million more folks will have access to high bandwidth. But your Web site will need to be as fast as ever to compete.

Brand choice is based more on inertia than real loyalty. The Web brands that win this year will stand for something different, convey that difference simply and elegantly, and focus more on user experience than matching competitive functionality widget-for-widget.

Peter Naylor, Eastern advertising manager, Lycos: It's an ad, ad, ad, ad, world. Business to Business on the Web will continue to experience tremendous growth.

Fast Company , Industry Standard , Business 2. Many of those business-to-consumer sites that saturated the media at the end of will be eerily silent and many Web dreams will be dashed by so much competition chasing such little mind share of consumers.

As a result of this separation between the winners and losers, radio and television will see the whopping VC-funded ad budgets dry up just after the Dot Com, er, Super Bowl 40 percent of Super Bowl ads are dot coms this year. George Shirk, editor in chief, Wired News, Lycos News: In , Internet offerings will continue its peculiar bifurcation, with New York's Silicon Alley asserting itself as the content capital and the West Coast remaining the capital of commerce and backend plumbing.

Here's what they predict Topics lifestyle.