Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."
- Isaac Asimov
 |
| Cellphone Voice Mail | ||
| Callers speak into their instrument, and the content of the call is stored by the network for the user to replay at will. |
Cellphone voice mail is commonplace today, of course. But somebody had to think of it - and Frederik Pohl was an early visionary. In the novel, access to voice mail is provided by the Joymaker, a wirelessly-networked personal digital assistant (PDA), cellphone and web "browser."
| "Your messages follow. Notice of personal visit: Taiko Hironibi will join you for breakfast... Adne Bensen sends you a kiss. First Merchants Audit and Trust invites your patronage. Society of Ancients states you have been approved for membership and relocation benefits..."
"You can skip the commercials..." |
| From The Age of The Pussyfoot,
by Frederik Pohl. Published by Ballantine in 1965 Additional resources -
|
Note that this voice mail system not only allows you to listen to recorded messages, it also lists the messages first by summarizing them, and then lets you pick from the verbally presented list. This feature was imagined by Pohl forty years before the iPhone.
Voice mail is commonly held to have been invented by IBM; work on the SFS (Speech Filing System) began in 1973. An operational prototype was offered to customers in 1975; voice mail was widely offered commercially in the early 1980's.
You might be surprised to know that voice mail was first imagined by Thomas Edison in 1878, shortly after he invented the phonograph and was trying to figure out what to do with it. See the entry for Networked Telephone Answering Machine (taken from a 1923 novel by H.G. Wells in which he described the modern concept rather neatly.
Comment/Join this discussion (BACK ON!) ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Age of The Pussyfoot
More Ideas
and Technology by Frederik Pohl
Tech news articles related to The Age of The Pussyfoot
Tech news articles related to works by Frederik Pohl
Cellphone Voice Mail-related
news articles:
- Klausner iPhone Voicemail Suit Neglects SF Prior Art
| Rats Communicate Brain-to-Brain |
| Microsoft Demos Spoken English To Chinese 'Universal Translator' |
| Kyocera Speakerless Smartphone (ala Gernsback) |
| Wavii Follows Your Selected News |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
'The legs are long, curled way up to deliver power, like a cheetah's.'
'It rested among green parklands and... stood in total isolation, a glittering block of whites and flashing windows dotted with colors.'
'George Walt's corporate existence proved the workability of wholly mechanical organs...'
'This was the center of Interplanetary Communications.'
'... the Scarab [flying robot] buzzed into the great workroom as any intruding insect might...'
'When he had first built them, they had been crude indeed, flying mechanisms with little more than a reflex-response unit.'
