When the clocks ticked over from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000, everyone in the entire world collectively held their breath to see if all of the computers would crash. There had been a great deal written and published about the problems of the internal clocks within the computers; there were questions of whether or not they would recognize the year 2000. Back in the 1970s and 80s, code writers did not think about the turn of the coming century when they incorporated time into their computer software and hardware. Computer software companies wrote code as fast as they could to avoid the problems. As fast as they wrote new code, the world waited and speculated as to how bad the crash would be at the end of New Year’s Eve.
There were great expectations for what would happen as we moved into the New Millennium. We expected much and we got more. There were some things we expected that never materialized. More than a few Baby Boomers who had learned math a long time ago determined they would be 40 to 60 years old at the turn of the century. Many were expecting to see George Jetson and his Jetcar. The Boomers knew that even if George did not come to pass, at least cars like his Jetcar would be flying all around. As the fireworks exploded right at midnight on December 31, 1999, many of the Boomers expected the world might possibly end when all of the computers crashed. However, more than a few Boomers were asking, “Hey, where’s my Jetcar?”
Each child watching the Jetsons cartoon early in the morning on Saturdays in the 1960s knew what was going to happen. They knew by the turn of the century, flying cars would populate the air over major cities as well as travel from one community to the next. Not only did they know flying cars would be our main mode of transportation, television and the movies reinforced this idea, along with the concept of common space travel.
Gene Roddenberry created the wonderful television series, Star Trek. Every Thursday evening from September 1966 until September 1969, Captain Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Scottie explored the universe daring “to go where no man had gone before.” In reality, man had just begun to fly higher than our own atmosphere; while Kirk and his crew traversed the universe on board the USS Enterprise, Michael Collins and John Young were wrapping up the last Gemini mission. As Collins and Young ended the Gemini series, Apollo was already poised on the pad reaching for the Moon.
We did not doubt we would travel to the moon and beyond. Again, Hollywood reinforced this idea in 1968 with Stanley Kubrick’s movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The world of aviation and space was exciting for the teenage Baby Boomers of 1969. There was no question of the great things coming first in aviation, and then in space. Indeed, the two industries fed on each other. For a young person during this time, flying and space travel presented a fantastic opportunity for a career.
I was a part of that time. I was one of those Boomers looking forward to traveling hypersonically and possibly into space. I was lucky in that I had the chance to fly jets and see the marvelous things that came about, such as Global Positioning Satellites.
Now, sitting and looking from this perspective, I wonder what the next 40 years will bring. I learned my trade in airplanes built the old-fashioned way, of steel tubes, wood, and fabric. When they taught me how to fly instruments, it was a good day to get an airplane with more than one radio, more than one VOR. It was really good if one of those radios worked.
During the last four decades of the Twentieth Century, advancements in aviation truly were phenomenal; I cannot imagine the kind of further advancements we will make over the next 40 years.
Still, I would like to know, …just where is my Jetcar?
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© 2011 J. Clark
