Re: JetPacks vs. AirCars

Darin Sunley (rsunley@escape.ca)
Sun, 22 Aug 1999 20:09:58 -0500

Spike Jones wrote:

> I dont recall any sci-fi stories that anticipated the web. Anyone?
> I suspect that many future technologies that will change everything
> will be more like the web than flying cars. spike

2001: A Space Odyssey [the novel], has Heywood Floyd, during his business class flight to the moon, manipulating a device that looks astoundingly like a laptop running a web browser. Flat panel touch display, hypertext, list of URLs of the world's major newspapers printed on the back. Stories updated by the newspaper companies continuously. Etc...

Seems to have missed the democratic aspect of it though. Probably only figured (if he put that much thought into it at all) that only large corporations could afford the head-end equipment.

That was 1966-68. what was Xerox doing with hypertext at the time. Had Dynabook been invented yet?

Darin Sunley
rsunley@escape.ca