What is this?

We Are Living in the Future collects the week’s tech news, from history.

The story we most often hear about tech goes something like this: In the beginning, computers were impossibly big and cumbersome machines, which lay beyond the reach of us poor mortal masses. Then, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs delivered us digital salvation.

But well before Bill and Steve—before Mark, Jeff, Elon, Sergey, the Larrys and all the other Great Men of Tech—people were experimenting with computers. They were using computers to learn, conduct business, make art, play games, commit crimes, stop crime, advance science, go through therapy, cook, compose music, and, of course, date.

This newsletter curates tech news articles from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Sometimes, the articles relate to current events, and they seem eerily prescient. Other times, they’re just funny.

Beware: this is not a comprehensive or rigorous “people’s history of technology.” (For that, check out Joy Lisi Rankin’s aptly titled People’s History of Computing in the United States.) The goal here is to entertain—and maybe, occasionally, to hold up a mirror you can look into across time.

We are, literally, living in the future.