news
Vintage Toronto Ads: Time Machines for Now
Source: Maclean’s, November 27, 1989.
It’s Tuesday morning, early in the second decade of the twenty-first century. There’s little time to sip a glass of crystal pure water, as there’s only fifteen minutes before a hover-taxi arrives to take a load of passengers to the Greater Toronto Spaceport in north Pickering. Better remember to bring the right keys this time before shooting off to the international moon base: light yellow for the house (not the dark yellow one that holds the morning edition of the Toronto Star-Sun), pink for your passport. Waiting patiently on the kitchen table is a venerable Casio timepiece, which has dutifully kept time for over two decades. The watch’s artificial intelligence knows that odds are fifty/fifty that the taxi will have to come back for you to retrieve it when you realize you’ve forgotten to put it on as you glide over Scarborough Town Centre.
Back in our version of 2011, unless a steady supply of not-yet-obsolete batteries have kept these beauties in perfect operating order, these watches are time machines only in the sense of preserving designs and technological advances from the late 1980s.