Strange Predictions
Aug. 10th, 2006 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryHugo Gernsback, in a story whose name I can’t recall—probably incorporated into New York in 2600—and Isaac Asimov in the first Foundation book, both anticipated the internet, although in ways that seem somewhat strange and naïve to us now.
Gernsback imagined that in the world of the future, one would take mass transit from your high rise apartment complex into the downtown of your city. There you would go into an enormous department store and see samples of merchandise of all kinds. You would tell the sales clerk what you wanted, and an identical item in the warehouse underneath the store would be placed in the system of high speed underground conveyor belts that underlay the entire city and would be mechanically routed to your apartment, where it would be waiting for you, sent up from the basement in a dumbwaiter, by the time you got back.
He couldn’t make the leap from the mechanical to the electronic.
The citizens of Asimov’s galactic Empire at its height carried—to use some of our terminology (I don’t have the book before me)—a palm pilot that held a PDF file of every book and journal ever published. And that was it. He had no conception of connectivity (e-mail, message boards) or that people might want to create specific forms for the electronic medium (web pages). Personally, I would trade the internet that we have for this; though it seems within a few year we might have both.
On a slightly different topic, Verne frequently predicted, from Paris in the Year 1960 onward, that in the future there would be no war because armies would possess such terrible weapons as an electric death ray that could wipe out a whole battalion of cavalry at once, so that the prospect of war would be too terrible to contemplate. Imagine that—a whole battalion! How naieve.
Gernsback imagined that in the world of the future, one would take mass transit from your high rise apartment complex into the downtown of your city. There you would go into an enormous department store and see samples of merchandise of all kinds. You would tell the sales clerk what you wanted, and an identical item in the warehouse underneath the store would be placed in the system of high speed underground conveyor belts that underlay the entire city and would be mechanically routed to your apartment, where it would be waiting for you, sent up from the basement in a dumbwaiter, by the time you got back.
He couldn’t make the leap from the mechanical to the electronic.
The citizens of Asimov’s galactic Empire at its height carried—to use some of our terminology (I don’t have the book before me)—a palm pilot that held a PDF file of every book and journal ever published. And that was it. He had no conception of connectivity (e-mail, message boards) or that people might want to create specific forms for the electronic medium (web pages). Personally, I would trade the internet that we have for this; though it seems within a few year we might have both.
On a slightly different topic, Verne frequently predicted, from Paris in the Year 1960 onward, that in the future there would be no war because armies would possess such terrible weapons as an electric death ray that could wipe out a whole battalion of cavalry at once, so that the prospect of war would be too terrible to contemplate. Imagine that—a whole battalion! How naieve.
