"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.
Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.
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.
- Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Arthur C. Clarke is generally considered to be the father of the telecommunications satellite, as he was the first to envision such a thing in his 1963 book "Glide Path". For that, we owe him a great debt. Clarke has, more than any other author, predicted (or dictated?) future trends in technology with astonishing accuracy. He was a firm believer that technology would become pervasive and would be relentlessly improved upon. And he lived to see many of his conjectures and ideas come to life in real products. And many more are surely to come.
Clarke had a saying about technology which I think pretty much sums up how far we've come. Imagining, for instance, what an African savannah dweller of a million years ago might think if confronted by a television set, he said:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
The device he describes in the book excerpt above should seem very familiar to anyone who has been reading this blog or listening to any kind of tech news in the last week. That product, almost to a tee, is an Apple iPad. Now, his timing was a little bit off, 9 years to be exact. But the Newspad he devised as a future information appliance in his 1968 book "2001: A Space Odyssey" just about couldn't be more prescient of Apple's new device. Just change his 2-digit code scheme, clearly devised from the television channel paradigm, to an internet URL of today and add wireless networking and a few other modern touches and BINGO. Notice that unlike personal computers in use today, his Newspad has no keyboard, and only a few buttons. The iPad has no keyboard and one button.
In 1968, flat panel display technology didn't exist, and neither did most of the technology that is packed into the iPad. The microprocessor wouldn't be invented for another three years. For the filming of the movie they constructed the Newspad using a white translucent panel upon which they projected movie film from below the cabinet to achieve the effect Clarke was going for: something new and magical.
What was magic in 1968 is now reality.
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