|
 For
various reasons, computers don't get much a look in from Future Past
and when they do they're usually along the lines of the
HAL 9000, but
we're not talking about huge electronic
brains with delusions of godhood here; we mean the sort of
computers that people would be dealing with in their everyday lives to
work, to play, and (all together now!) balance their cheque books.
These sort of computers are remarkably rare in Future Past, but they
are not unknown.
In most predictions of the future, computers are powerful, mysterious
machines with rather vaguely defined functions-- and we mean in
serious predictions as well as in the sci-fi pulps. The general
idea is that computers are things which must be tended by a priesthood
of technicians who would feed them questions and interpret the answers
for the masses like some technocratic cult of Delphi. The idea
that ordinary people could sit down at their desks and use a keyboard
to communicate directly with the cybernetic Presence was regarded as
impractical, if not a bit unseemly.
 Still, from time to time some authors did come close to the mark.
Isaac Asimov's Multivac short stories revolved around a stereotypical
electronic brain as conceived in the 1950s. It was gigantic to
the point of making a first generation IBM look like a palmtop in
comparison; omnipotent, omniscient, and... You get the idea.
The difference with Multivac is that it wasn't tended by scientists via
some monolithic control panel with a monitor screen the size of a Jumbotron, but instead had terminals spread all over the world in
homes, bars, offices, and street corners where people could type in
their questions and get suitably pompous, enigmatic replies.
In between running the planet and evolving into a suitably tame
secular version of God it would even take time out to thrash you at
three dimensional chess, if you were suitably masochistic.
 Aside from having a load of remote terminals,
though, Multivac was still just a God machine that had to field questions
from the congregation. For a much closer pass between the
future and Future Past we must turn to Murray Leinster and his 1946
short story "A Logic Named Joe." This comic tale, written in
aggravating dialect style, revolves around machines known as "logics,"
which look like televisions, except they had keyboards. This
miracle of 1974 could not only act as a television, but also as a
videophone. In addition, it could keep books, record contracts,
serve as a filing system and (all together now!) balance your cheque
book. It also hooked up over the phone lines to huge
electronic "tanks" filled with "data plates" that allowed you pull up
the news, check the weather reports, or to type any question you like
into a logic and back came the answer. That's a pretty
close pass at "PC," "server," and "Google" for the form.
The fun comes in when one day in August the logics started giving out
information that people would rather not be given. That's a
pretty close pass, too.
But for the all-time record for accurate prediction
one must once again turn to Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy for the most spot on prediction with his
creation of Eddie the Shipboard Computer; a PC that was so
enthusiastic, so ingratiating, so unrelentingly user-friendly that you
couldn't check your e-mail on it without having an intense urge to
re-programme it with a very large axe. |
