As a lifelong Seattle World’s Fair nerd, you know I love geeky pictorial presentations about the wonderful world that awaited us in the 21st Century. Today I have some thing different. The nostalgia site SquareAmerica.com has slides from an IBM business-to-business promo presentation about the near future of business computing, in 1975.

Note the date. This is the exact final year in which big mainframe computer complexes, and the companies that sold and maintained them, could realistically see themselves as the center of the data processing universe. The first true home computers came along the next year. By 1980, IBM was had authorized a fast-track project to develop the first IBM PC, midwifing MS-DOS along the way.

But in 1975, Big Iron still ruled. And the folk behind that Big Iron knew where the future lay. It lay with connecting mainframes and networking compatible databases.

In a word: ONLINE.

Hey, they were at least right about that part.