VANITY: Modern Computer Technology (1954/2004)

Email ^ | 1954 | RAND Corp.

[Dallas59]

Wait...I gotta PG13 her...

[sionnsar]

Hey! Where'd you get my picture? :-)

Turn right about 45 degrees, look up about 12.5 degrees, and you should see the camera. *\;-)

[MeekOneGOP]

ha! Sure enuff! :^D

I missed that the first go-around.

[ADemocratNoMore]

>I used to have a book "Giant Machines that Think" by >Edmund Berkeley written in 1949. I sold it on eBay a few >years back. There was one paragraph I saved as it was so >prophetic:
>"We can even imagine what new machinery for handling >information may some day become: a small pocket instrument >that we carry around with us, talking to it whenever we >need to, and either storing information in it or receiving >information from it."

In one of the books in the original Foundation series by Issac Asimov, written between 1951 and 1953, one of the protagonists uses a modern scientific/statistical pocket calculator. Asimov's description of the device was dead-on!.
One of there days I'll pull my copy out of the attic and quote the relevant part.

Also, in the early to mid 50's, George Adamski, who wrote about his cruises aboard Venusian and Saturnian flying saucers was describing wall sized color displays of moving charts and graphs in the UFO's control room, in an era almost 20 before some gearheads figured out how to play Pong on their CRT terminals.

[ADemocratNoMore]

in an era almost 20 before some gearheads figured out how to play Pong on their CRT terminals.

Make that "in an era almost 20 years before some gearheads figured out how to play Pong on their CRT terminals."