It was a prescient
concrete embodiment of what were at the time only futuristic concepts.
Dr. David Donnelly
Right or wrong? You be the judge: 1999
In 1945, Vannevar Bush envisioned a means of information access
that resembles the current means of linking information via
hypertext. See his article As We May Think reprinted at
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm.
In 1964, Martin Greenberger used Bush's proposals to outline
market possibilities for information services, electronic commerce
and community. The Atlantic Monthly has reprinted his article The
Computers of Tomorrow at
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/greenbf.htm.
David Sarnoff and William S. Paley both published rather accurate
predictions of the future direction of TV at the very beginning of
the 1930's. The essays have been reprinted in the Historical Journal
of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1981, pp. 163-166.
"It is hard to imagine all the parts television will play in our
lives in the future. ........ You might market or shop over telephone
television, and see exactly what you are buying." Jeanne and Robert
Bendick, Television Works Like This (NY: Whittlesey House:McGraw-Hill),
1959, p.62.
"The fifty years since Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the
telephone cover an advance in communications so rapid and continuous
that one is easily tempted to prophesy. No doubt the future of the
telephone art holds wonders equaling, perhaps surpassing, those which
have already entered the pattern of existence. It requires little
imagination, for instance, to believe that vocal communication
between continents, already demonstrated experimentally, some day
will become commonplace, and that such world-wide facilities for
conversation must affect profoundly the relationships of states and
peoples." Arthur Pond, The Telephone Idea: Fifty Years After, (NY:
Greenberg Publisher), 1926, p. 52.
Science fiction writer Arthur
C. Clarke, the author of the book 2001, envisioned satellite
communication twenty years before it became a reality.
In a 1966 report of the
Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on the Year 2000, the authors
predicted "a national information computer-utility system with tens
of thousands of terminals in homes and office hooked into giant
central computers providing library and information services,
retailing, ordering and billing services and the like."
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