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Cellphone voice mail is commonplace today, of course. But somebody had to think of it - and Frederik Pohl was an early visionary. In the novel, access to voice mail is provided by the Joymaker, a wirelessly-networked personal digital assistant (PDA), cellphone and web "browser."
Note that this voice mail system not only allows you to listen to recorded messages, it also lists the messages first by summarizing them, and then lets you pick from the verbally presented list. This feature was imagined by Pohl forty years before the iPhone.
Voice mail is commonly held to have been invented by IBM; work on the SFS (Speech Filing System) began in 1973. An operational prototype was offered to customers in 1975; voice mail was widely offered commercially in the early 1980's.
You might be surprised to know that voice mail was first imagined by Thomas Edison in 1878, shortly after he invented the phonograph and was trying to figure out what to do with it. See the entry for Networked Telephone Answering Machine (taken from a 1923 novel by H.G. Wells in which he described the modern concept rather neatly. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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