* Your golden age was about decade out from the Wright flyer and Big Dog has been out for a while.
* More to the point: the airplane had little competition in it's field - the wright flyer was already faster than a balloon. Walking robots' primary advantage is in rough terrain, which is only a advantage in marginal areas (if walkers moved with even the same efficiency as (inherently simpler) wheel vehicles, we would still want to confine them to paved roads. Consider how, relative to a wheel vehicle of the same weight, it's likely a walking robot would take a greater toll than on any path or road it used because it's movement would involve inserting its weights at specific points and pushing).
* Treaded vehicles have around for a while and they do some portion of what a walking vehicle could do in a military setting - an army is quite will to the destroy a forest to move through it. And further, continuous track can things walkers couldn't - moving over swamp and other muck. Walkers might, maybe find a marginal use along side other specialized vehicles. But walkers have an inherent problem - if they are a lot bigger than a horse, what keeps them from sinking in the soft ground they have to be targeted for. If they aren't bigger than a horse, what makes them better than the presumably cheaper horse?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_track
* We never got our flying cars and video-phones have taken a long time. Shows that not all possible tech becomes practical tech in a simple fashion.
* Your golden age was about decade out from the Wright flyer and Big Dog has been out for a while.
* More to the point: the airplane had little competition in it's field - the wright flyer was already faster than a balloon. Walking robots' primary advantage is in rough terrain, which is only a advantage in marginal areas (if walkers moved with even the same efficiency as (inherently simpler) wheel vehicles, we would still want to confine them to paved roads. Consider how, relative to a wheel vehicle of the same weight, it's likely a walking robot would take a greater toll than on any path or road it used because it's movement would involve inserting its weights at specific points and pushing).
* Treaded vehicles have around for a while and they do some portion of what a walking vehicle could do in a military setting - an army is quite will to the destroy a forest to move through it. And further, continuous track can things walkers couldn't - moving over swamp and other muck. Walkers might, maybe find a marginal use along side other specialized vehicles. But walkers have an inherent problem - if they are a lot bigger than a horse, what keeps them from sinking in the soft ground they have to be targeted for. If they aren't bigger than a horse, what makes them better than the presumably cheaper horse? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_track
* We never got our flying cars and video-phones have taken a long time. Shows that not all possible tech becomes practical tech in a simple fashion.