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"We're about 20 minutes away from the point where Clarke's law kicks in and technology becomes indistinguishable from magic."
- Peter Watts
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| Interactive Map | ||
| A small book with a 'touch-screen' paper interactive map. |
This is a remarkable idea; it predates by decades similar ideas from cyberpunk novels of the late 1980's and early 1990's.
| ...it gave me a little plastic book with four fold-outs, maps of the city's transit system. When I wanted to go somewhere, I touched the silver-printed name - street, level, square - and instantly on the map a circuit of all the necessary connections lit up. I could also travel by gleeder. Or by rast. Or - finally - on foot; therefore, four maps. |
| From Return from the Stars,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Not known in 1961 Additional resources -
|
I'm just astonished at how modern this idea is. The map is clearly interactive; it is described as being some sort of very thin-film device - it's not a tablet PC.
Compare this item to Neal Stephenson's mediatron from his 1995 novel The Diamond Age.
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'With one fluid motion, it surged forward, plunged, and was gone.'
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'The program raced up the screen one scan line at a time, subtly smoothing, deleting and coloring.'
'The death penalty was his immortality, and he would vote the death penalty for any crime at all.'
I can't resist science-fictional elements. Especially when they're real.
'The heart of it was a vast hexagonal structure of welded metal, ten miles across...'
