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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Palm Plate | ||
| A device that scanned for a palm print prior to opening a door. |
Nyeeda, the personal secretary to the Matriarch who administered all of Earth, wanted access to Comain, the supercomputer that provided predictions and instructions. Not everyone was provided with unrestricted access to Comain, however.
| An elevator carried Nyeeda deep into the heart of the building and she left the cage at a point three hundred feet below sea level. A metamen, its scanning eyes flaring with ruby light, stepped before her, then, as she gave the password, stood aside and let her pass. A short passage opened into a wide area, and crossing it, the girl pressed her palm against a sensitised plate sunken into the wall beside the thin slit of a closed door. Machinery hummed as the lines of her palm registered on the plate, and, the pattern tripping electronic relays, the door slid smoothly to one side, exposing a small chamber. |
| Technovelgy from The Mechanical Monarch,
by E.C. Tubb. Published by Ace Books in 1958 Additional resources -
|
The palm plate is an early description of what we would today call a biometric identification system.
Compare to the palm lock from Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert.
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Tech news articles related to works by E.C. Tubb
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
