14 DAY TRIAL // A fridge called ChillHub that runs Ubuntu was just announced last week, but it looks like Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, was making a similar announcement back in 2006. And he was using the famous voice and accent of the Borat movie character.
It would have been difficult to imagine a fridge running Ubuntu back in 2006, and the announcement made by Mark Shuttleworth was definitely a joke, but little did he know that it would actually come true in less than a decade. If we put aside the quality of the video and the fact that Mark used to have a lot more hair back then, the announcement itself is pretty impressive.
A decade ago a fridge powered by an operating system was hard to imagine, but not impossible. The necessary architecture was not available at that time, and that included the hardware. It wasn't a science fiction proposition, just a very expensive one. No one was going to invest in a smart fridge when the cost for the hardware would have been higher than the price of the fridge itself.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are real
In this case, Mark Shuttleworth made a "prophecy," in jest, but he managed to deliver it even if that wasn't his intention, and even if he made that video by using the name of the famous character Borat.
It goes to show just how much technology can change in a single decade. We are not used to thinking about just how different things were back in 2005, but when we do get to see a video of what we believed back then, it sounds almost ridiculous. And now imagine that we go a decade into the future. All the talks about convergence, powerful mobile devices, and mini-PCs with ridiculous sizes will sound just as ridiculous as ever.
Enjoy!
