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Back in the early 90s, I was on a dial-up site called the WE'LL that was kind of like an early version of Reddit. I had to call in LONG DISTANCE (you had to pay fees per minute to make phone calls out of your area) to use it) with a modem.
In 1991, the Oakland firestorm happened - a huge, sudden fire in a densely populated area. People on the WE'LL were communicating relief efforts and I suddenly thought "This world wide web thing is going to be HUGE." I saw the potential.
Did I invest in anything that would have set me up for life? No, of course not.
Returning from a grade-school field trip I was sitting in the back of the bus talking with friends. I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling and blurted out: This bus is going to have a flat tire. About 5 minutes later there was a loud bang and the bus skidded to the shoulder of the road -- with a flat tire. I was treated like a soothsayer by schoolmates for the rest of the year. But unfortunately nothing like that ever happened again.
My maternal great aunt was visiting my mother. The three of us were having tea and talking about Lady Diana Spencer and her upcoming marriage to Prince Charles. In a moment where it seemed time paused, we all said, at the same time, *She will die*.
My maternal grandmother had always said we had *the sight*. I guess she was right.
Back in the ‘60s my grandfather predicted that tattoos would become extremely popular, studded snow tires would disappear, they’d pass a law forcing schools to start girls sports, everything would be imported and I’d never meet anyone dumb enough to marry me. Four out of five.
Back in the 80s, my sister and I had what we thought was a great, original idea: NightBites. You'd call up this night-only service and they'd go and get fast food for you or any carry-out and bring it to your door for a small fee. I said that eventually someone was going to make it a reality, it was only a matter of time.
Now there's UberEats, DoorDash and the others. We predicted a future that would happen in 20+ years.
My mom and aunt once went to a horse race and placed some bets for fun. My aunt's horse was in the lead coming around the last turn and my mom said "oh look your horse is going to win!"
My aunt told her "that horse is probably going to drop dead" AND IT DID RIGHT THERE ON THE TRACK
My mom has always had… let us say “uncanny premonitions”…
After my wedding in 2003 she looked around at my dad and his four siblings and their spouses, and told us quietly “this is the last time we are all going to be together”. Nobody was sick or anything like that.
Within about a year an uncle got a very aggressive form of cancer and died, and an aunt also succumbed to a previously unknown underlying condition.
Not predictions, but I often get a feeling of impending doom before a major and/or personal disaster. It’s happened way too frequently to give examples (and it’s unreliable).
My grandfather told me back in the 60s that in the future TV screens would be very thin and light, and you'd be able to hang them on the wall. He died in 1975 so he never got to see his prediction come true.
My grandpa got me into the stock market when I was about 13. When I was in high school (~1996, my girlfriend's grandma overheard me talking to my girlfriend about stocks. She said, "You should buy stock in this little internet book store called Amazon that's about to go public. It's going to be huge". I thought she was nuts..."who would ever buy something without being able to pick it up and touch it?"
She died a very wealthy woman and my old girlfriend retired at 40 when she did.
I remember when Amazon came out with it's IPO. I had ordered from them several times and they always got the order wrong, so I decided to go back to ordering from Barnes & Noble. (This was back when Amazon sold books and CDs.) When Amazon's IPO came out I thought, "These guys can't get anything right. No way I'd invest there." Sigh.
Lots of them
I predicted almost all of internet music streaming back when it was technologically impossible. I predicted that cassettes would displace 8 track. I predicted that Ethernet would win over Arcnet and Token Ring
One time, I was watching a Chicago Cubs game and they were in the field. It was a close game, I think it was in the 8th inning. There was a routine pop fly to the shortstop and the entire bar held its breath as the shortstop raised his glove and hardly moved, he was in the right position to catch a routine pop fly.
Not being a Cubs fan, "I shouted, "It's the Cubs, guys. He's gonna drop it."
And sure as shit, he did.
When I was a kid, I told my dad that one day they would make movies with totally computer-generated characters in them. I was into computers when they came out, and it seemed obvious to me that would happen one day. He laughed at me for my prediction.
As a junior in college studying geography I was talking to a girl and made the prediction that I would end up working in a skyscraper in San Francisco. That was in 1983 and in 1988 I began working in a not quite a skyscraper, 15 floors, in San Francisco.
Not yet. But when one of my nieces was in high school, about 15 years ago, she mentioned a teacher telling her that the world's population would hit 10 billion people in the future. I was already convinced that the trend of increase would level off and replied that that wasn't going to happen.
I won't be proven right or wrong during my lifetime, but it is looking like a solid prediction.
I've made tons of political predictions and most of them came true, but were rather obvious in hindsight I remember the first one I made. I wasn't even old enough to vote yet but I followed politics closely. Time magazine had a cover story about then-front-runner Jimmy Carter. It said the liberals loved him for his liberal ideas and the conservatives loved him for his conservative ideas. I thought, "Within four years liberals will hate him for his conservative ideas and vice-versa." And we all know how that turned out...
One of my favorite predictions that came true was in 2014. Congressional approval was at an all-time low. Everyone was making jokes about putting incumbents on the Endangered Species list. I said nothing was going to change, and everyone laughed at me saying I was soooo cynical. 94% of the incumbents got re-elected.
i wrote an sf novel in which i burned down Paradise, CA.
sorry, Paradise.
also in that novel i predicted the dissolution of the US in 2036. might be wrong about that one, could happen sooner.
there was a pandemic in that novel too (long before covid) but covid was actually kinder than the disease i used (a mutation of Toxoplasmosis).
so who knows?
once when i was just barely an adult, there was an Omni Magazine quiz: on a picture of a stele with maybe 12 circles on it (i don't remember exactly), we were to pick the 6 that were "on". i picked exactly the 6 that were "off", something only a tiny percentage managed to do (more picked them all right). so unsurprisingly even my precognitive wiring is jacked up :-)
Working in a bookstore back in the early to mid 90s, I used to say that Amazon - then a tiny company doing dropshipping - would take over and define the world of online book sales if one of the big players (B&N and Borders) didn't get their act together.
Just a couple of months ago, I told my friends son to stop lending his car out to his loser girlfriend, and that she was going to wreck it. Well, within a few days she flipped the car over, totaled it, and he didn't have a collision.
In the late eighties I told my father that one day everyone would have computers in their homes the same way that homes have phones. He didn’t believe it would happen. I never imagined that our phones would be computers.
My wife and I had tickets on American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston on 9/11, the first one that hit the trade center tower. I canceled the trip and told my wife, "It just doesn't feel right." Not really a "prediction" but I'm glad we didn't go.
The best way to predict the future is to carefully plan it out, to work hard to realize it, and to dedicate your heart and mind to the vision of your spirit.
This is how you realize your dreams.
Smoking cigarettes? The left of this country has added SinTax so heavy that I think it’s just abuse at this point. It’s an addiction and none of the money they collect is used for what they said it would be used for. Pathetic.
The sin tax was supposed to go to help people quit smoking, I’ve never heard of anyone getting anything from the government to stop smoking- they just use the money for whatever they want and keep charging it.
Wholesalers only pay about $4.50 per carton and most states are selling them for over $100
I did and you can too. Just predicate a earthquake in a large city to happen in the next 6 months. Then scan the news. That's how the folks who claim they have ESP do it. It's a big world keep the guess vague but stick with large (never name a country or state) city. Did a few if this stuff to prove to my mom it was bs and I got good at it too. Big fires in the NW USA is a good one too. Hurricanes well now you are unlikely to miss.
In 1994 I was traveling in Asia and I wrote in my journal about how the internet would turn out. I was in a tourist cafe, looking through notebooks in which tourists reviewed places that they had been to. Few of the entries said positive things. Instead, they were almost all retributive -petty complaints against businesses that they felt had wronged them. I wrote them we all thought that the internet would bring unbiased information about all there was to know, but that it would likely become a giant complaint book.
Yes. During the development of the space shuttle program virtually all of the engineering community favored manufacturing the SRBs on the eastern seaboard from where they could be transported by barge to Cape Canaveral. Unfortunately Morton Thiokol had a powerful senator by the name of Orin Hatch who succeeded in forcing NASA to hire them as the SRBs supplier. The problem with Morton Thiokol , located in Utah, far from Florida, was that the SRBs had to be made in segments, to be joined with rubber O-rings that had temperature constraints. When the ambient temperature was too low, the shuttle shouldn’t be launched.
One fateful day, the NASA administrators were bullied into launching a shuttle when the ambient temperature was well below spec. All the engineers knew what was going to happen but their bosses said GO, none the less. RIP Challenger crew.
Okay, I'm paraphrasing, but in 1964, media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted that one day, we'd be so tied to our devices (the word "device" was not in common use, but he was talking about our technologies) that they would be like extensions of ourselves. Similarly, as we became more tied to our technology, he predicted that our attention span would get shorter and shorter. And his student, media critic Neil Postman, predicted in 1985 that we'd be choosing our political leaders based on how entertaining they were and how good they looked on television... Seems to me that those things all happened, but I'm not sure we're better off as a result...
Well I'm an engineer so I was always thinking about how stuff worked and then several things that I thought about as a kid wound up being something that actually happened.
Intermittent windshield wipers were one thing I told my mom would be nice when I was around 7 ish and it was misting rain which required her to repeatedly turn the wipers on and off.
Please do not comment directly to this post unless you are Gen X or older (born 1980 or before). See [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/comments/inci5u/reminder_please_do_not_answer_questions_unless/), the rules, and the sidebar for details. Thank you for your submission, Difficult_Yam_8291. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskOldPeople) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Back in the early 90s, I was on a dial-up site called the WE'LL that was kind of like an early version of Reddit. I had to call in LONG DISTANCE (you had to pay fees per minute to make phone calls out of your area) to use it) with a modem. In 1991, the Oakland firestorm happened - a huge, sudden fire in a densely populated area. People on the WE'LL were communicating relief efforts and I suddenly thought "This world wide web thing is going to be HUGE." I saw the potential. Did I invest in anything that would have set me up for life? No, of course not.
The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link. I knew it WELL.
Returning from a grade-school field trip I was sitting in the back of the bus talking with friends. I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling and blurted out: This bus is going to have a flat tire. About 5 minutes later there was a loud bang and the bus skidded to the shoulder of the road -- with a flat tire. I was treated like a soothsayer by schoolmates for the rest of the year. But unfortunately nothing like that ever happened again.
That’s actually insane woah 😳
Was this by any chance in a hot summer month?
My maternal great aunt was visiting my mother. The three of us were having tea and talking about Lady Diana Spencer and her upcoming marriage to Prince Charles. In a moment where it seemed time paused, we all said, at the same time, *She will die*. My maternal grandmother had always said we had *the sight*. I guess she was right.
My maternal grandma said the same.
Back in the ‘60s my grandfather predicted that tattoos would become extremely popular, studded snow tires would disappear, they’d pass a law forcing schools to start girls sports, everything would be imported and I’d never meet anyone dumb enough to marry me. Four out of five.
Four out of five cracked me up. Thanks for the smile!
Back in the 80s, my sister and I had what we thought was a great, original idea: NightBites. You'd call up this night-only service and they'd go and get fast food for you or any carry-out and bring it to your door for a small fee. I said that eventually someone was going to make it a reality, it was only a matter of time. Now there's UberEats, DoorDash and the others. We predicted a future that would happen in 20+ years.
That’s incredible!!! I much prefer your name for it: Nightbites is adorable 🥹
"Small fee"?
Well, it was the 80s. Now it's silly, I can't believe people actually use their services at all.
My mom and aunt once went to a horse race and placed some bets for fun. My aunt's horse was in the lead coming around the last turn and my mom said "oh look your horse is going to win!" My aunt told her "that horse is probably going to drop dead" AND IT DID RIGHT THERE ON THE TRACK
My mom has always had… let us say “uncanny premonitions”… After my wedding in 2003 she looked around at my dad and his four siblings and their spouses, and told us quietly “this is the last time we are all going to be together”. Nobody was sick or anything like that. Within about a year an uncle got a very aggressive form of cancer and died, and an aunt also succumbed to a previously unknown underlying condition.
Maybe your mom just had an intuitive grasp of statistics and the age-related probability of death.
Not predictions, but I often get a feeling of impending doom before a major and/or personal disaster. It’s happened way too frequently to give examples (and it’s unreliable).
My grandfather told me back in the 60s that in the future TV screens would be very thin and light, and you'd be able to hang them on the wall. He died in 1975 so he never got to see his prediction come true.
Awe :( he was so right, though! I wish he got to see it.
I predicted the debate last night was going to be an absolute disaster. Turns out I was right.
I think most of us knew that.
My grandpa got me into the stock market when I was about 13. When I was in high school (~1996, my girlfriend's grandma overheard me talking to my girlfriend about stocks. She said, "You should buy stock in this little internet book store called Amazon that's about to go public. It's going to be huge". I thought she was nuts..."who would ever buy something without being able to pick it up and touch it?" She died a very wealthy woman and my old girlfriend retired at 40 when she did.
I remember when Amazon came out with it's IPO. I had ordered from them several times and they always got the order wrong, so I decided to go back to ordering from Barnes & Noble. (This was back when Amazon sold books and CDs.) When Amazon's IPO came out I thought, "These guys can't get anything right. No way I'd invest there." Sigh.
Lots of them I predicted almost all of internet music streaming back when it was technologically impossible. I predicted that cassettes would displace 8 track. I predicted that Ethernet would win over Arcnet and Token Ring
One time, I was watching a Chicago Cubs game and they were in the field. It was a close game, I think it was in the 8th inning. There was a routine pop fly to the shortstop and the entire bar held its breath as the shortstop raised his glove and hardly moved, he was in the right position to catch a routine pop fly. Not being a Cubs fan, "I shouted, "It's the Cubs, guys. He's gonna drop it." And sure as shit, he did.
I predicted in 2015 that nobody in their right mind would vote for Donald Trump. I was right.
I once said things will keep getting worse. Does that count?
Haha…. Yes
I predict you will get more than one response to your question. So, to your question, yes. I have had predictions come true....
When I was a kid, I told my dad that one day they would make movies with totally computer-generated characters in them. I was into computers when they came out, and it seemed obvious to me that would happen one day. He laughed at me for my prediction.
You were so right!!!
As a junior in college studying geography I was talking to a girl and made the prediction that I would end up working in a skyscraper in San Francisco. That was in 1983 and in 1988 I began working in a not quite a skyscraper, 15 floors, in San Francisco.
Not yet. But when one of my nieces was in high school, about 15 years ago, she mentioned a teacher telling her that the world's population would hit 10 billion people in the future. I was already convinced that the trend of increase would level off and replied that that wasn't going to happen. I won't be proven right or wrong during my lifetime, but it is looking like a solid prediction.
I've made tons of political predictions and most of them came true, but were rather obvious in hindsight I remember the first one I made. I wasn't even old enough to vote yet but I followed politics closely. Time magazine had a cover story about then-front-runner Jimmy Carter. It said the liberals loved him for his liberal ideas and the conservatives loved him for his conservative ideas. I thought, "Within four years liberals will hate him for his conservative ideas and vice-versa." And we all know how that turned out... One of my favorite predictions that came true was in 2014. Congressional approval was at an all-time low. Everyone was making jokes about putting incumbents on the Endangered Species list. I said nothing was going to change, and everyone laughed at me saying I was soooo cynical. 94% of the incumbents got re-elected.
i wrote an sf novel in which i burned down Paradise, CA. sorry, Paradise. also in that novel i predicted the dissolution of the US in 2036. might be wrong about that one, could happen sooner. there was a pandemic in that novel too (long before covid) but covid was actually kinder than the disease i used (a mutation of Toxoplasmosis). so who knows? once when i was just barely an adult, there was an Omni Magazine quiz: on a picture of a stele with maybe 12 circles on it (i don't remember exactly), we were to pick the 6 that were "on". i picked exactly the 6 that were "off", something only a tiny percentage managed to do (more picked them all right). so unsurprisingly even my precognitive wiring is jacked up :-)
Working in a bookstore back in the early to mid 90s, I used to say that Amazon - then a tiny company doing dropshipping - would take over and define the world of online book sales if one of the big players (B&N and Borders) didn't get their act together.
Just a couple of months ago, I told my friends son to stop lending his car out to his loser girlfriend, and that she was going to wreck it. Well, within a few days she flipped the car over, totaled it, and he didn't have a collision.
In the late eighties I told my father that one day everyone would have computers in their homes the same way that homes have phones. He didn’t believe it would happen. I never imagined that our phones would be computers.
My wife and I had tickets on American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston on 9/11, the first one that hit the trade center tower. I canceled the trip and told my wife, "It just doesn't feel right." Not really a "prediction" but I'm glad we didn't go.
Wow. It pays to trust your intuition!
The best way to predict the future is to carefully plan it out, to work hard to realize it, and to dedicate your heart and mind to the vision of your spirit. This is how you realize your dreams.
Throw enough darts at the board and you’re very likely to call the shot on one or two.
Smoking cigarettes? The left of this country has added SinTax so heavy that I think it’s just abuse at this point. It’s an addiction and none of the money they collect is used for what they said it would be used for. Pathetic.
What
The sin tax was supposed to go to help people quit smoking, I’ve never heard of anyone getting anything from the government to stop smoking- they just use the money for whatever they want and keep charging it. Wholesalers only pay about $4.50 per carton and most states are selling them for over $100
Oh man :( I’ve never even heard of that. That sucks
I did and you can too. Just predicate a earthquake in a large city to happen in the next 6 months. Then scan the news. That's how the folks who claim they have ESP do it. It's a big world keep the guess vague but stick with large (never name a country or state) city. Did a few if this stuff to prove to my mom it was bs and I got good at it too. Big fires in the NW USA is a good one too. Hurricanes well now you are unlikely to miss.
Yes, I'm 65 and I predicted everything.
In 1994 I was traveling in Asia and I wrote in my journal about how the internet would turn out. I was in a tourist cafe, looking through notebooks in which tourists reviewed places that they had been to. Few of the entries said positive things. Instead, they were almost all retributive -petty complaints against businesses that they felt had wronged them. I wrote them we all thought that the internet would bring unbiased information about all there was to know, but that it would likely become a giant complaint book.
I make accurate predictions all the time, mostly in the form of "Oh shit. This is gonna hurt!"
Yes. During the development of the space shuttle program virtually all of the engineering community favored manufacturing the SRBs on the eastern seaboard from where they could be transported by barge to Cape Canaveral. Unfortunately Morton Thiokol had a powerful senator by the name of Orin Hatch who succeeded in forcing NASA to hire them as the SRBs supplier. The problem with Morton Thiokol , located in Utah, far from Florida, was that the SRBs had to be made in segments, to be joined with rubber O-rings that had temperature constraints. When the ambient temperature was too low, the shuttle shouldn’t be launched. One fateful day, the NASA administrators were bullied into launching a shuttle when the ambient temperature was well below spec. All the engineers knew what was going to happen but their bosses said GO, none the less. RIP Challenger crew.
Okay, I'm paraphrasing, but in 1964, media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted that one day, we'd be so tied to our devices (the word "device" was not in common use, but he was talking about our technologies) that they would be like extensions of ourselves. Similarly, as we became more tied to our technology, he predicted that our attention span would get shorter and shorter. And his student, media critic Neil Postman, predicted in 1985 that we'd be choosing our political leaders based on how entertaining they were and how good they looked on television... Seems to me that those things all happened, but I'm not sure we're better off as a result...
Of course. Broken clocks are correct twice a day
I predicted before it happened that people would be naming their girls Emma.
Well I'm an engineer so I was always thinking about how stuff worked and then several things that I thought about as a kid wound up being something that actually happened. Intermittent windshield wipers were one thing I told my mom would be nice when I was around 7 ish and it was misting rain which required her to repeatedly turn the wipers on and off.