Arthur C. Clarke predicts that people will each have their own computer - GIF

[Floradawg]

ALL of the recent shows I've attended in the last few years I got emailed tickets with links to stick them in my iPhone wallet.

I think Clarke was probably more surprised at how the smartphone changed society than widespread personal computers.

World-wide reach of a personal info lookup/maps/guided maps/camera/entertainment and oh yea the quaint old function 'telephone' in your pocket is quite a thing,.

Makes watching old reruns of police procedurals seem really quaint...saw a 'Streets of San Francisco' episode a while back where Karl Malden had to find a phone booth to call in to HQ to pass along a clue.

I can't help but wonder what he would have thought of the sadness of what was done to Sri Lanka. He loved that country and made it his home for the final years of his life.

[Saltfever]

(snip . . . ) By 1974 Clarke knew full well what was going to happen; the Apple I was only 2 years away at that point, and arguably the first personal computer in existence, The Altair 8080 would be released in 1975 as a kit popularized in Popular Electronics. Don Lancaster had already created the TV Typewriter in 1971, but that was all done with discrete logic; the Altair was the first with a modern microprocessor.

I believe the S-100 bus with CP/M operating system and Intel 8080 processor might have been just before the Apple with a Fairchild chip. Altair-Lancing was popular but the Godbout S-100 was quite big in the San Francisco Bay Area. I remember when Godbout came out with a 64k RAM board and I thought that was all that would ever be needed! LOL

All microprocessor computers were called personal computers ("PC") at that time. The term was used universally to distinguish the emerging culture from the traditional main-frames (IBM 360, PDP, etc). IBM took a the common, generic term "PC" and used it to label their first iteration. They were late to the game by 8 years and caused a lot of ill will by capitalizing on a common term used by all.

[Duke_of_URL]

Where have all the "futurists," like Mr. Clarke, gone? There were once so many of them... perhaps we've reached the end of our "future?"