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"I can remember when the first pulsars were discovered. I was able to go and sit down and listen to graduate students talking about what their theories, to explain what pulsars really were."
- Vernor Vinge
 |
| Beltway | ||
| A moving sidewalk. |
This is the earliest use of this term that I know about.
| As he went down the ramp, the city’s hot, metallic smell greeted him and the deep toned vast growl of its teeming millions. After two days of isolation the terminal’s bustle confused, almost terrified Brad but he found himself on the beltway at the platform’s center and let it carry him down into the dim cool cavern beneath the enormous depot that bestrides mid-Manhattan.
The conveyor leveled out again, slid past the arched openings of the tubeways whose stupendous subsurface network finally had solved the metropolis’ perennial traffic problem. Glowing signs named the farflung metropolitan districts, from Perth Amboy to Peekskill, from Long Island’s South Shore to the Raritan. Behind each a tubecar whined into its terminal trough, disgorged a half-dozen passengers, swallowed a half-dozen others from the head of the waiting line and vanished to be immediately replaced by another. The whole system fanned out from this hub at the Old City’s center. Unless one’s destination was on the same line as his starting point, he transferred here. Long before the beltway had carried Brad to his own tube it had become annoyingly congested... |
| Technovelgy from The Faceless Men,
by Leo Zagat. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1948 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the speed belt from Slaves of Mercury (1932) by Nat Schachner, the slidewalk from Fritz Lieber's 1941 Sanity.and the moving roadway from H.G. Wells' 1899 story When the Sleeper Wakes.
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'If you surf over a bump, the spokes contract to roll over it.'
'He wrote on it, using the pointed fingernail of his right forefinger...'
'Frank was cursing into his wristpad, switching between Arabic and English.'
'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
