7 ms·

There was a short story, which appeared in one of the HP calculator-centric publications of the 70's or 80's, I think written by a certain George R.R. Martin or

by oofoe 10y ago

There was a short story, which appeared in one of the HP calculator-centric publications of the 70's or 80's, I think written by a certain George R.R. Martin or Gordon Dickson, which attempted to extrapolate the HP 41CX into a portable voice activated assistant that could schedule appointments for you. I remember thinking that was pretty far fetched for a calculator. I don't think it would have made much more sense if the author had referred to the device as a "phone"...

jerf 10y ago
On the one hand, if you squint, yes, we all have them in our pockets. On the other hand, I recall a lot of "personal assistant" predictions in which phones were personal assistants, not just glorified calendars. As in, able to call the other person and do a live negotiation of times over voice, possibly with the other person's assistant. We don't have that yet; that turns out to be harder than we thought. Even the recent trend towards "bots" are still focusing on people interacting with the bots; nobody's brave enough to have the bots reaching out to people other than their customers and interacting with them yet, AFAIK. (Those who seem to use a lot of humans in the backend.)