i don’t know, we should ask Jonathan.
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Arthur C Clarke lived until the year 2008, a few months before Google was formed. If he were still alive he would have turned 100 last December.
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In our ouse, wead a Tandy wut would only run on the blood of children. Upset me mam sommat awful, that Tandy. But we didn’t complain. Oh no, not if we wanted t’ play Loderunner.
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If a refrigerator fits on your desktop. (Digital came out with their desktop model in 1982.)
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I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
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Virtually all the world’s information will be available to anyone, anywhere, through a single electronic nervous system that sends text, sound and imagery to a tiny device in your pocket.
We’ll mostly use it to share cat videos.
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I don’t know what ‘are phones’ even means anymore. I make calls on my desktop and tablet as often as on the device called ‘phone.’
Oh don’t worry. It’ll end soon enough.
Arthur C Clarke lived until the year 2008, a few months before Google was formed
Google was founded in 1998. But certainly, all of the futuristic information technology from his novel Imperial Earth (1976) was available by then. That novel was set around 2300.
Weirdly, an early story by Arthur Clarke features an abacus which saves the day when the single onboard computer fails on a spacecraft. For some reason he didn’t mention slide rules, which played a large part in the US space programme of the 1960s.
Ah, but did he predict the effects of universal access to porn?
Yeah around 1960 or so, though he was referring mostly to TV broadcasts from satellite, and their ability to bypass local content laws.
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I still have some of the custom ones around somewhere… typically rotaries, although I think there were some slipsticks made especially for rocket science, too.
I’m flashing back to the early 1970s when I took a course in university in Fortran. How I made it through the course is long forgotten.
We’d take our little instructions to the computer center which was a huge room full of mainframes which, given time, would run the code.
Which is to say I’m scared to watch the video.
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Alan Kay first proposed the Dynabook in 1968.
The term project of a course in operating system design that I taught at Brown in 1970 was to design an OS for it.
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I’m not sure where I got the 2008 figure from, although I did Google it.
I also remember when Google was this little thing on Slashdot asking everyone to check it out instead of Altavista, but wherever I got the 2008 date from, but I figured, ‘what the hell, I’ll use that, then.’
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At the time there were plenty of microcomputers that would fit on a desk (many of them made by HP). Plus, the IBM 5100, which was the first “portable” and the first desktop computer to include a CRT, came out in 1975.
ETA: I should say that I love Arthur C. Clarke. We’re all just reacting to the headline.
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That kid’s dad a bowler? He seemed a pretty perceptive interviewer, however, seizing immediately the social aspect of these developments
Those were the days, now we need a whole cloud to store shit
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Tsk, tsk.
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The letter “o” was a luxury back then, couldn’t be layin’ out for unnecessary "o"s when Da’ had to afford gravel for our bellies. Kids these days, think letters grow on trees!
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Liked for Loderunner. Thanks for the memories.
One of the rare games where some of the home-micro adaptations were better than the arcade, IMO.
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I wasn’t sure of exact years. David Ahl did have a portable prototype of the PDP-8 before he left DEC in 1974. I wasn’t sure at what point a smaller version was common. It seemed like an obvious direction. I also wasn’t sure without looking when the LSI-11 came along to make a smaller PDP-11. Very early in Byte history the SCCS had a group buy of LSI-11 bits. Wikipedia lists a DEC terminal from about 1972 that has an LSI-11 inside, so that would be desktop.
But my real point was that in 1974 there were lots of indicators t hat small was the future, especially if you were following the future. It would be a bigger deal to foresee “cheap”, or how they were used.
Science fiction for a long time didn’t foresee small or cheap computers. Heinlein couldn’t even see better interfaces to computers. I thought an early Clarke book had a pocket terminal or something, but it was something I read somewhere. Heinlein gets credit for “cellphones”, but really it was common portable phones. He doesn’t detail technical matters, though an early book lists a couple of things that have to be overcome. But cellphones are more than mobile phones, a lot of stationary infrastructure, including microprocessors.
But in 1974, as I said, the future was almost there, especially for someone who kept track of the future.
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