A Space Odyssey and an on-point prediction

source

source

source

source

source

source

I am about half-way through reading A Space Odyssey: 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke. I have always been a fan of Kubrick's film version and after I bought what I thought was the original story in book form, I learned that Clarke's book and Kubrick's screenplay were written simultaneously. Very interesting.

But, this post is about an interesting passage I came across while reading. Turns out, Arthur C. Clarke invented the ipad. At least, the idea of the ipad. In the images above, you can see, in both the cover art of the book and a scene from the movie, characters using almost ipad-identical devices.

He even was close with the name! Check it out:

When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him....

...Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.

It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.

From 2001: A Space Odyssey , by Arthur C. Clarke.
Published by Del Rey in 1968


This was 1968 people. We hadn't even landed on the moon yet. I don't know about you, but I find this pretty impressive.

Let's just hope the whole HAL thing doesn't come true any time soon.