The future arrives in a hurry very seldom–it’s almost always a culmination. Molly Wood of the New York Times observed that the excitement of this year’s just-completed CES emanated not from new ideas but from the realizing of old ones. An excerpt:

This year’s CES had the feel of a World’s Fair. There were futuristic BMWs zipping around the streets surrounding the Las Vegas Convention Center, drones buzzing through the air inside and outside the convention center, and just about everywhere you looked a vision of roboticized homes that take perfect, synchronized care of their inhabitants. There was even 3-D-printed food.

It made for an exciting show, to be sure. There was an energy in the air in Las Vegas that had been lacking in previous years, helped by an influx of interesting start-ups, good conversations about a variety of technology and yes, even some really impressive TVs. It wasn’t, thank goodness, the same old thing.

And yet, in some ways, it was. The biggest trends of the year were actually technological concepts that have been around for decades, if not centuries.

Autonomous cars had their conceptual debut at an actual World’s Fair in 1939, where General Motors imagined a world of cars that were propelled along an automated highway system.

Similarly, attendees of the 1934 World’s Fair in Chicago saw a prototype of a home automation system that would later show up in science fiction stories like Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt and of course in The Jetsons.

As for virtual reality, cinematographers and scientists were actually building virtual reality devices at least as early as the 1960s. In 1962, Morton Heilig, the so-called father of virtual reality, patented the Sensorama — an immersive viewing system with a moving chair, a head-mounted display, stereo speakers and odor emitters. So 2015.•