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"As the rate of technological development speeds up, the gap between science fiction and what we’re living now is getting narrower all the time."
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This is a very early use of this idea. Remember that the idea of a "printer" - a device that you have in your home that prints out material at your command - has not been invented yet. In 1879, a "printer" is a person who works in a shop producing many copies of the same paper.
The only real-life predecessor to this device that I can think of is the ticker tape machine, also called a stock ticker. This device was used to remotely print stock price information conveyed over telegraph lines from 1866 to 1970. Thomas Edison patented a stock ticker in 1869 that printed one alpha numeric character per second! The stock ticker is the real-life counterpart to the virtual ticker shown at the bottom of the screen on financial television. The patent for amplitude modulators for fax machines (allowing the transmission by phone lines) was issued in 1911.
Compare this device to the personalized news from Hugo Gernsback's 1911 novel Ralph 124c 41 + and the homeopape from his 1969 novel Ubik (it is also called the homeostatic newspaper in his 1963 story If There Were No Benny Cemoli). Comment/Join this discussion ( 1 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
SpaceX Intros Extravehicular Activity Suit
'Provision had been made to meet the terrific cold which we knew would be encountered the moment we had passed beyond the atmosphere.'
Athena Smart Security Guard Robot With Face Recognition
'You are who we say you are, Dr. Dakin,' Turner said.'
The FLUTE Project - A Huge Liquid Mirror In Space
'It's area, and its consequent light-gathering capacity, was many times greater than any rigid mirror...'
Robot Preachers Found To Undermine Religious Commitment
'Tell me your torments,' the Padre said, in an elderly voice marked with compassion.
SpaceHopper Microgravity Robot Lands On Its Feet
'...a slender-legged tripod surmounted by a spherical body no larger than a football.'
Brin's 1990 Novel Earth Still Full Of Predictions
'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
Gaia - Why Stop With Just The Earth?
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
Microsoft VASA-1 Creates Personal Video From A Photo
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
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