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"It was [H.G. Wells'] adolescent fiction, his imaginative stories, that live forever - and yet are not acknowledged in literature classes as being great literature. So to hell with the academics!"
- Greg Bear
 |
| Calculator Pad | ||
| Used to make psychohistoric calculations |
Everyone uses smartphones or tablet computers that are basically just a thin slab faced with glass. The idea was somewhat more exotic in 1951, when the only computers were room-sized, and the first computer terminal had only been invented a few years before.
| Seldon removed his calculator pad from the pouch at his belt. Men said he kept one beneath his pillow for use in moments of wakefulness. Its gray, glossy finish was slightly worn by use. Seldon's nimble fingers, spotted now with age, played along the hard plastic that rimmed it. Red symbols glowed out from the gray... "That represents the condition of the empire at present." |
| From Foundation,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1951 Additional resources -
|
I have a Cassiopeia Pocket PC; its gray, glossy finish is also slightly worn by use (written in 2003!). Just to give you some material for comparison, in 1951 the big news in computers was the use of vacuum tubes. CBS purchased a Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) for use in predicting results in the 1952 presidential elections; it took up most of a 15'x15' room.
Note that Seldon's pocket computer was no mere calculator, also at it did not use the touch screen interface now all the rage in computing. (As it happens, I'm making this addition to the text on this web page using a iPad, another descendant of this idea.)
Bypassing the present, you might want to see the future view of this kind of device - the Control-Face, from William Gibson's Idoru. Compare to the blue optic plate from EM Forster's 1910 The Machine Stops.
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Calculator Pad-related
news articles:
- E-paper You Can Write On From Seiko Epson E Ink
| Galaxy Z Fold 3 Perfect For William Gibson's 'Control-Face' |
| Poor Humans. Miami Herald Bot Writes Great Real Estate Articles. |
| CGI 'Master Faces' Impersonate Several Identities |
| GIDE AI Tools 'See Days In Advance' |
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'Employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors...'
'The robot knelt before the head, lifted it slowly, and with... its strong hands placed it on its shoulders...'
'But it had slid, not rolled, down upon these angry fly-wheels, and in an instant, with all our friends, it had been hurled into the sky!'
'Three rows of four colored dots appeared on the heel of my left hand.'
'I brought it back to the ship, charged it up, reprogrammed the inertia chips and voila!'
'Their playmates were not “real,” but they were a lot realer than, say, a Betsy-Wetsy doll.'
'pirate three-vee satellites sanded out of orbit...'
'Oh, there you are! the balloon piped at the amorphous mass of living tissue...'
