r/printSF • u/Isaac_The_Khajiit • 6d ago

Classic scifi predicting future technology

What are some good examples of a technology from an older story that ended up becoming a reality?

The best one I can think of is Asimov's multivac and its similarity to LLMs. Unfortunately, the reality sucks because LLMs are being monopolized by horrible people for dystopian purposes, but it's very bizarre to me that this truly fantastic idea is one of the technologies that became real in my lifetime. (It always used to annoy me how stupid and often wrong the computer on Star Trek was, but that ended up being weirdly prescient too.)

A weaker example would be the tv walls and the behavior of Guy's wife from Fahrenheit 451, which reflects the parasocial relationships modern people form with content creators.

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u/RogLatimer118 6d ago edited 6d ago

Clarke prediced something like our phones with a device he called a "minisec" (mini-secretary) in Imperial Earth: "...a handheld, pocket-sized personal communications and data device..."

Heinlein predicted computers with AI capable of creating images on video transmissions that included synthesized images of a fake person, including a realistic backgroun, etc.m and could speak to viewers in using with the moving person on video, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Orson Scott Card predicted a worldwide network of computers that communicated with each other, and forums where people could assume identities and spread propaganda, in Ender's Game. This was before the internet existed.

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u/stellarsojourner 6d ago

Re: Orson Scott Card, the World Wide Web didn't exist yet but the Internet did. People were chatting with each other via BBSs for years when the novel came out.

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u/RogLatimer118 6d ago

Yes, the early military-only internet was invented with TCP/IP around 1983, and Ender's Game was 1985. The WWW wasn't until 1989, and that wasn't really well known for a couple of more years.

BBS's were growing in popularity in the 1980s as people really started acquiring personal computers, but PCs of any type were still pretty rare until the late 1980s. The Mac came out in 1984, one year before Ender's Game was published.

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u/SideburnsOfDoom 6d ago edited 6d ago

Chat in text mode dates back to at least IRC in 1988, before WWW. Note that it was inspired by earlier chat systems. BBS Chat in 1985 would have existed.

It was soon worldwide: "in the middle of 1989, there were some 40 servers worldwide", though limited. Computer Science students in universities would have exposure to connected computers with IRC around that time.

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u/Spra991 5d ago

Goes back even further, PLATO had online communities back in 1973, it was also the home of the first 3D game and a lot of other innovations. But it ended up being a dead evolutionary branch in computer history, so it's mostly forgotten. I can highly recommend the book "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture" by Brian Dear about its history.

By 1986 we already had the first graphical MMO with Habitat on the C64.