The Null Device

Remember BeOS, the super-nifty object-oriented operating system of the 1990s? Well, BeOS itself may be no more (apparently Palm bought it and then proceeded to not do much with it), but there is now an open-source BeOS-influenced OS named Haiku, which appears reasonably functional. There are images downloadable which you can play with in VMWare Player or similar. There's an article about it here.

(via Engadget) ¶ beos haiku os open-source operating systems retrofuturism [no comments]

In March, the British Library is hosting hosting a futurist banquet, based on Futurist Manifesto author Filippo Marinetti's 1932 La Cucina Futurista:

The starter makes it clear that this will be no ordinary meal. Expect to be served an olive, a quartered fennel bulb and a kumquat, while the fingers of your free hand stroke morsels of velvet, silk and sandpaper. At the same time the scent of carnations will be sprayed into the room and your ears will be assailed by “wild jazz”, Wagner and aeroplane noise.

Typical Futurist dishes included meat broth sprinkled with champagne and liquor and decorated with rose petals, or the deliberately obscene-looking porco eccittato, a whole cooked salami upended on a plate with coffee sauce mixed with eau de cologne.

Benito Fiore, chairman of the Italian Academy of Cuisine in London, is hosting the event to support the British Library exhibition Breaking The Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937. He said: “Marinetti was a really fantastic person but his food was awful to eat. We are trying to make it edible.”

¶ art food futurism london retrofuturism [no comments]

Blog discovery of the day: Paleo-Future, a blog devoted to yesteryear's predictions for the future, from Buckminster Fuller's visionary contraptions to tree-crushing, highway-building robot juggernauts, to flying cars, robot housemaids, free love (a feature of several 1970s-vintage predictions of life in a few decades' time), and vast oceans of leisure time, all tagged by category and decade.

Don't expect to find any dystopias, mass die-offs or post-apocalyptic wastelands here, though; the fragments featured in Paleo-Futurism all have an upbeat tone, often to the point of naïveté, informed by a faith in the march of technological progress which seems charmingly quaint today. What was in the water supply in the mid-20th century anyway?

(via Boing Boing) ¶ culture futurism predictions retrofuturism science tech utopia [no comments]

Via fact244, a lengthy, extensively-illustrated article on retrofuturism. It's in Italian, but even if you can't read it, the illustrations speak for themselves. They range from the quaint (models of future cities of gigantic highways, and anyone in parts of California or Britain can tell you how well that model of urban planning turned out) to the outlandish (such as maps for a global railway/monorail running across the Bering Strait, or dams to drain parts of the Mediterranean), as well as the usual streamlined cars, jetpacks, spaceplanes, old magazine ads and lots of pulp sci-fi magazine covers.

¶ retrofuturism [7 comments]

Retro-futurism: Some predictions for the year 2000, written in 1950.

Any marked departure from what Joe Dobson and his fellow citizens wear and eat and how they amuse themselves will arouse comment. If old Mrs. Underwood, who lives around the corner from the Dobsons and who was born in 1920 insists on sleeping under an old-fashioned comforter instead of an aerogel blanket of glass puffed with air so that it is as light as thistledown she must expect people to talk about her "queerness." It is astonishing how easily the great majority of us fall into step with our neighbors. And after all, is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like Joe Dobson's, a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household appointments, and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?

¶ 2000 amusing history retrofuturism [no comments]