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"The answer to the problem of information overload on the Net is reputations… engineer a system called a reputation server."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Voder | ||
| Device that produces speech by purely mechanical means. |
| Bormon, in the narrow confines of his armor, disconnected the mechanical voder used by its deposed owner, for all Martians are voiceless. |
| Technovelgy from Exit From Asteroid 60,
by D.L. James. Published by Planet Stories in 1940 Additional resources -
|
Robert Heinlein uses the word in a slightly different sense in his 1942 story Waldo:
Turning back to Stevens he added, “But if Baldur amuses you, you must see Ariel."
“Ariel?"
Instead of replying, Waldo touched the keyboard of the voder, producing a musical whistling pattern of three notes. There was a rustling near the wall of the room “above” them; a tiny yellow shape shot toward them — a canary. It sailed through the air with wings folded, bullet fashion. A foot or so away from Waldo it spread its wings, cupping the air, beat them a few times with tail down and spread, and came to a dead stop, hovering in the air with folded wings.
There were control panels of several sorts, some of which seemed obvious enough in their purposes — one for lighting which was quite complicated, with little ruby telltales for each circuit, one which was the keyboard of a voder, a multiplex television control panel, a board which seemed to be power relays although its design was unusual...
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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.'
