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"We'd have most of what we predicted of the conquest of space, if we hadn't ignored parasite control."
- Larry Niven

Floating Booths  
  Comfortable bar booths that float around and come together for conversation.  

Cziller's House of Irish Coffee. Inside, the place was still a cube, a one-story building forty meters high. Padded horseshoe-shaped sofas covered the entire floor, so close you could hardly squeeze between them, each with a little disk of a table nestling in the center...

"Interesting place," said Jilson. "These booths were built to float... It didn't work out. Lovely idea though. The chairs would swoop through the air, and if two people at two tables wanted to meet they'd slide their booths together and lock them magnetically."

Technovelgy from Handicap, by Larry Niven.
Published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1967
Additional resources -

This idea made me think of the same notion done large in Ringworld.

Niven kept trying to get people together in bars via technology; see Monobloc dating system.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Handicap
  More Ideas and Technology by Larry Niven
  Tech news articles related to Handicap
  Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven

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