I was a teenager in the late 80s and a huge sci-fi fan. A lot of that TV was guessing the future. Some of it held. Some of it didn’t.

Knight Rider (1982–86) got the talking car. KITT spoke in ordinary language, argued with the driver, and tried to keep him from wrecking it. That’s a voice assistant in the dash and lane-keep. What it missed was the invulnerable partner: armor that shrugs off rockets, jumps a highway, never dies mid-chase. We got driver assist. We did not get a bulletproof co-pilot you can buy.

Galactica 1980 came out of the late-70s original: chrome Centurions and a machine uprising. Human-looking infiltrators show up here, in “The Night the Cylons Landed,” as mechanical androids — not the organic copies from the 2000s remake. What aged badly was parking the fleet on contemporary Earth. The real fight went to software, networks, and persuasion.

Quantum Leap (from 1989) got the pocket link to a talkative computer. Al’s handlink and Ziggy are not far from a phone plus an assistant. Consciousness leaping into other people’s bodies stayed fiction. It made a good anthology. It was not engineering.

Max Headroom (UK telefilm 1985, ABC 1987–88) was closer on the social side: ratings as the only score that mattered, ads crushed into seconds, one reporter feeding live pictures from the street. That looks like the attention economy, short ads, and people live-streaming from their phones. What it got wrong was still thinking in cable networks. “Twenty minutes into the future” missed the open internet. Blipverts that explode viewers were a gag. Max sold as software was mostly an actor in makeup and jump cuts.

Blake’s 7 (into the early 80s) feared a surveillance state and a computer that could reach every other computer. That is closer to intelligence work, advertising data, and state hacking than most of the shiny American shows. Teleport bracelets and a near-magical ship still cannot beat the Terran Federation. That part is wishful.

Red Dwarf (from 1988) got AI as personalities and virtual reality as an escape: Holly on a screen, Rimmer as a hologram, Better Than Life. It never really guessed the smartphone. It guessed being stuck on a ship with software for company.

What I notice now is simple. Cars got partway there. Advertising and surveillance got further. A lot of American shows feared hardware. A lot of British shows feared the database. The Leap handheld was the phone. The leaping itself stayed magic.