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"I realized there was a heavy-duty change coming in biology, and I could write a really compelling novel about catastrophic evolution, punctuated equilibrium."
- Greg Bear
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| Visiplate | ||
| A flat screen for viewing remote images. |
This is an early reference to this term. As I recall, Buck Rogers movie shorts from the thirties used what appeared to be a vision plate. The earliest attempts to project images using radio waves used a spinning mechanical disk as a mask over a varying light source to produce the picture.
The first public demonstration of television occurred in England in 1926; by the mid-1930's, a few broadcast stations sent programming to a very small number of privately-owned sets.
| Crane looked into the visiplate and gasped. |
| Technovelgy from Skylark Three,
by E.E. 'Doc' Smith. Published by Amazing Stories in 1930 Additional resources -
|
Here's another quote for this term from First Contact, a classic Murray Leinster short story:
Leinster also used this term in earlier stories (mid-thirties), but I don't have a quote from those stories. Similar terms were used in the sf from this era.
Here's an enjoyable quote from Spore Trapper, a 1937 short story by RR Winterbotham:
The earliest reference to a "vision screen" is the cinematophote, from E.M. Forster's prescient story The Machine Stops, published in 1909.
Now, of course, we actually have visiplates - that is, flat panel displays. And it only took sixty years for them to come into common usage
He handed over the photographs and looked with professional interest at the visiplates which showed all space outside the ship...There was the little gadget of oddly angled mirrors - remote descendant of the back-view mirrors of twentieth century motorists - which allowed a view of all the visiplates without turning the head. And there were the huge plates which were so much more satisfactory for a direct view of space.
The visiplate near the controls of the atomic engines glowed as he touched the contact button. A cloudy mist swirled as electrons took their places to reveal the wrinkled features of Isaac McDonald...
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| Augmented Reality Book Covers Reveal The Inner Book |
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'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
'It seems that at one time computers were designed directly by human beings.'
'...the spot was a lonely one in an uncharted region, far from the normal lanes of space traffic.'
