Announcing "In The Year 2000" Flickr Group

Paleofuture.com and Boing Boing Gadgets has teamed up to create a new Flickr group, "In the Year 2000," a place to upload images depicting futuristic speculation from magazines and books from the past. We've only a few images up there at the moment, so don't go over there expecting a lot of retro-future entertainment just quite yet. But obviously, if you'd like to contribute, you're more than welcome! (Most of my first contributions came from my friend "dd".)

The images for "In The Year 2000" don't even have to be strictly of gadgets. I put up a few images of home decor design that evoke a future that never quite came to pass, even though no one can deny the appeal of lounging on asymmetrical couches in speed suits.

To complement In the Year 2000, I'd also like to create a group to contain scans of old electronics manuals, product advertisements, catalogs, brochures, and instruction manuals—things that may have implied the future to promote their product, but weren't predicting it outright. (Much of the stuff available on the excellent Modern Mechanix site would be perfect, for example.)

Problem is, I'm having a heck of a time coming up with a clever name for the second group. I tried riffing on "In the Year 2000," but wasn't coming up with much; it'd be nice if the names reflected each other, but it's not critical. And it's important to get across that "In the Year 2000" is for retro-future items, while the other group is for everything else. Any ideas?

[#1 posted by GeekAlerts , August 30, 2007 8:47 AM]

Very cool! Looking forward to some more images.

A post on this is also up over at Neatorama now.

[#2 posted by Joel Johnson , August 30, 2007 8:55 AM]

Oh, awesome. Neatorama is great.

[#3 posted by Anonymous , August 30, 2007 4:29 PM]

For your second flickr group, how about calling it "The Future is NOW!!!"

[#4 posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden/Moderator , August 30, 2007 6:14 PM]

"The Unbuilt Future" -- or is that too long?

[#5 posted by Joel Johnson , August 31, 2007 3:20 AM]

That's not bad, Teresa, but the kind of stuff I'm talking about was built, so it needs to be something to imply things that could actually have been bought.

What about "Electro-Selectro"? I like using the old buzz terms, like "electro" or "o-lux".

[#6 posted by Joel Johnson , August 31, 2007 5:29 AM]

Ooh, or what about something kind of faux Latin-y, like "Codex Electro"?

[#7 posted by Anonymous , September 6, 2007 2:40 PM]

I'm a week late getting here, so I suppose this may have been decided, but I would have suggested:

"Previously The Latest"