When I was young, there were supposed to be permanently manned lunar bases by the distant year 2000, manned expeditions to Mars starting in the 1980s, and all sorts of giant, exciting space stations in Earth orbit, where one could go for a vacation almost as easily as hopping on an airplane to Hawaii (we'd have this fleet of Space Shuttles that could launch quickly and put stuff in orbit for pennies per pound).

And flying cars, and videophones, and personal jetpacks to take you to work or the immense shopping mall, and robots that would clean your house and do all the yardwork, and giant cities filled with huge, gleaming skyscrapers that no one would ever even think of smashing an airplane into, and food made into convenient little pills, and nuclear generators in your backyard to power your home, and...

http://davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm

Heck, I even thought I'd live to see the BIS interstellar probe Daedalus at least be sent on its way to Barnard's Star (the prediction was that it would be ready technologically by the mid-21st Century, including a space infrastructure that would allow us to build it around the Jovian moon Callisto, as we would need to mine Jupiter's atmosphere for the otherwise rare Helium-3 needed for Daedalus's fusion drive. Piece o' cake.).