What used to be here

If an old bookmark or link brought you here, the page you were after belonged to an earlier website at this address. That site is gone, and its pages, documents and pictures are not reproduced here. This note explains what it was and where to find the closest current material.

2007: an enthusiast's tribute site

Around 2007 the domain carried a hand-built site with a simple three-word promise: cars, power and broadband. It described itself as an enthusiast's site following a handful of ideas that were then attracting attention: a compressed-air car being developed in France, wireless mesh broadband and "intelligent" local power networks being worked on in Christchurch, and the looming question of peak oil.

2008 to 2016: emerging technologies for energy, transport and communications

The site grew into a broader collection of pages on energy, transport and communications. Its most cited page explained how the French compressed-air engine was supposed to work, including its "active chamber", and that page is still referenced in encyclopedia articles about compressed-air cars. Other pages covered solar and distributed generation, mesh networks, coal and nuclear power, and peak oil. By the early 2010s the tone had become more sceptical, noting that prototypes kept appearing while production did not.

Around 2016 to 2017

The later pages focused more narrowly on compressed-air energy ideas, including small air-powered vehicles, street lighting and storage.

2018 onward

The site stopped carrying real content and eventually lapsed. The domain was registered afresh in October 2026.

The site today

TheFuture is now an independent explainer with new editors. It keeps the original subject, emerging technology for energy, transport and communications, and the original question of whether each idea will actually reach people. It does not speak for any company the old site followed, and nothing here is an offer or a recommendation to buy into anything.

Where to go next

• The compressed-air engine, explained afresh: MDI's active chamber and the compressed-air engine
• The air-car years: Air cars 2007 to 2016
• Peak oil, revisited: Peak oil, twenty years on
• Mesh networks then and now: Wireless mesh networks
• Local power: Distributed generation and smart grids

For the old pages themselves, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine keeps snapshots of many websites.