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"There's no point in making a mistake unless you understand the mistake so that you don’t make it again."
- Alfred Bester
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| Trace Web | ||
| A small, handheld device that contacts (and even instantiates) the larger network. |
Fascinating early use of the word web for a vast, interrelated data network.
| "Here we go, sir," the robot pilot said. The words startled Rogers and made him look up sharply. He tensed his body and adjusted the trace web inside his coat as the bubble ship started dropping, swiftly and silently, toward the planet's surface...
Rogers' fingers touched the trace web. The web warmed into life. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said. |
| Technovelgy from Souvenir,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Fantastic Universe in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Based on this usage, people should start calling their phone a "web" anytime now.
Compare to the control-face from William Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru and of course to the Joymaker from Frederik Pohl's 1966 novel The Age of the Pussyfoot.
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
