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"I feel like I've been very fortunate in that I've stuck like a burr to the dog-leg of the next generation of nerdism. I've been carried into the XXIth century on Bill Gates' pants-cuff."
- William Gibson
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| Public Call | ||
| A form of communication in which a group of people would remain isolated, but through technology could see and hear each other. |
One of the earliest descriptions of what we would describe as a zoom call, or conference call, in which all participants could see and hear each other.
| The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her arm-chair she spoke, while they in their arm-chairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest...
Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received. |
| Technovelgy from The Machine Stops,
by E.M. Forster. Published by Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909 Additional resources -
|
As a one-to-many system, compare to the Mirror Grid Multiple-View Surveillance Panel from Wandl, the Invader (1932) by Ray Cummings and the Multi-View Surveillance Display from This Moment of Storm (1966) by Roger Zelazny.
See also the Zoom Call Visaphone System from John Jones's Dollar (195) by Harry Stephen Keeler and the virtual assembly from If The Sun Died (1931) by R.F. Starzl.
As a videocalling system, compare to the detailed article about the telephonoscope from Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century) (1882) by Albert Robida, the phonotelephote from In the Year 2889 (1889) by Jules Verne, the
telephot from Ralph 124c 41 + (1911) by Hugo Gernsback, the
video communicator from The Machine Stops (1909) by E.M. Forster, the
videophone from The Golden Girl of Munan (1928) by Harl Vincent, the
optophone from Too Many Boards! (1931) by Harl Vincent and the opti-phone from The Impossible World (1939) by Eando Binder.
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and Technology from The Machine Stops
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
