This week’s newspaper contains some articles telling how our residents and officials in the 1970s thought about the future: future needs, future development, future population.

We are all taking the long march of time, and wondering what comes next must be an exercise in imagination, grounded in what we are experiencing now.

So, for fun, we have gone to an article that ran in the Gazette-Journal on Feb. 2, 1961, predicting what life in this world would look like in the future … of 1976.

Of course, 1976 is now nearly half a century into the rearview mirror. Here are some forecasts from 1961 for that time, as reported in Kiplinger’s Changing Time magazine:

“Computers will develop a phenomenal capacity to remember and analyze data … They will be used in production, in management, in government planning, in medicine and in air travel. The electronics industry will make dramatic strides in developing machinery for data processing. Automated machinery, using electronics as its b...