Friday, February 24, 2006

OK - so I'm about 25 years behind, but I've finally gotten around to picking up "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".

Now I'm probably not the first person to pick up on this, but considering this book was written so long ago, some of these "predictions" are amazing.  From Chapter 3:

The contents of Ford Prefect's satchel were quite interesting in fact and would have made any Earth physicist's eyes pop out of his head, which is why he always concealed them by keeping a couple of dog-eared scripts for plays he pretended he was auditioning for stuffed in the top. Besides the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic and the scripts he had an Electronic Thumb - a short squat black rod, smooth and matt with a couple of flat switches and dials at one end
(ed. - sounds kind of like an iPod shuffle);  he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice.


Wow.

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