How the phone of the future was seen in 1981

User fulminic has posted an interesting album on Reddy. According to the author of the post, in honor of the centenary of technology in 1981 in Holland was held a design competition "Phone of 2000".

Participants were from 13 to 25 years old, they were divided into three groups. The main prize for each of the three age categories was a trip to Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA. Among the thousands of works, the most interesting were selected and published in the book “Hello, this is the future.”

Fulminic had this book from a mother who then worked as a telephone operator. That instance was lost, so the result in the form of these images required a considerable amount of search effort. Here are just a few examples of work.


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Most of the participants in the competition believed that by the year 2000 we would definitely switch to radio communications. As a modern man in the street knows, they were not mistaken, cellular networks became widespread, even if the phones did not go so far technically by that date: Nokia 3310 was a typical representative of 2000. There are several wired models among the works.




The author of the concept above believed that the phone of the future would be built into the watch.




People of even the recent past very often considered video linking the highest achievement. Today, some of us, because of the lack of social skills, prefer to communicate with the text, rather than seeing someone else’s face or speaking out loud, although there is enough channel width. The author of the concept above predicted this and added a video mute button.


Wallet with built-in bank cards, telephone and calculator. Today, the ability to pay from a smartphone with the help of NFC is widely developed - just recall Apple Pay.


The main purpose of the concept of satellite communications Comp. STIFT-Phone is a communication simplification for people with disabilities: it has real-time subtitles for the deaf, relief buttons for the blind. As conceived by the author, it can be used to play checkers and chess and make video calls. The phone has a stylus and a tape recorder.






Why do you need a separate device, if it becomes so small that it can be inserted under the skin? The microphone is inserted into the little finger, the speaker - into the thumb. The whole hand will be the antenna, and the user will recognize the call by the vibration in the index finger. The most futuristic in this concept is the assumption that there are adequate speech recognition systems by the year 2000. Even after 15 years, they make inadmissibly a lot of mistakes, automatic subtitles remind of this under any video on YouTube.






Modern smartphones have really become something like a Swiss knife, but in a figurative sense.