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> A top-tier scientist from the 19th century may well have pronounced just about all of today's digital devices impossible science fiction. "Billions of calcula
by webmaven 5y ago
> A top-tier scientist from the 19th century may well have pronounced just about all of today's digital devices impossible science fiction. "Billions of calculations per second in something in your pocket that runs on a battery?"
Heck, actual science fiction authors in the mid-20th century got that wrong. Asimov, for example, while he had autonomous robots walking around, limited mobile computing devices (installed in anything smaller than a spaceship) to calculators and dumb terminals. Output was often limited to ALL CAPS printed on a slip or strip of paper (again, despite robots able to communicate verbally).
- radley 5y agoI'm rereading Asimov's Foundation series on a Kindle and writing this on a wireless keyboard to a website. In his 70 year old series, everyone still uses film :)
- webmaven 5y agoOTOH, Asimov definitely got the importance of miniaturization right in that series, though he mostly applies it to things like force fields and the like, rather than computing devices (other than the tools psychohistorians use). BTW, you may enjoy Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis. Well worth reading, it adds quite a few interesting and plausible embellishments to Asimov's conceptual framework.