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"I think we're still on that topic, still trying to figure out what computers are, how they change us, why we use them."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Filmbook | ||
| A storage medium for information, both text and video. |
Filmbooks not only show you interesting facts, but they help you to remember them.
| FILMBOOK: any shigawire imprint used in training and carrying a mnemonic pulse. |
| Technovelgy from Dune,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Putnam in 1965 Additional resources -
|
The filmbook technology builds on several different Dune ideas. Shigawire is a multipurpose science fictional device; it is a recording medium, based on the idea of wire recording, which preceded recording tape (in the real world).
The mnemonic pulse is a based on the real-world idea of a mnemonic device, a trick to help people remember. For example, I can easily remember the Harvard Spectral Classification Scheme, which goes in order of decreasing temperature. The types are OBAFGKMRNS; you can remember it with the mnemonic device Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now Sweetie. (One guesses that astrophysicists of that era were mostly male...)
A wealthy collector's study looks like this:
Compare to filmag from Sunward Flight (1943) by Leo Zagat.
The globe sat on a freeform stand at one wall of a windowless room whose other walls presents a patchwork of multicolored scrolls, filmbooks, tapes and reels. Light glowed in the room from golden balls hanging in mobile suspensor fields.
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'Space-sickness is one of the most unpleasant sensations that a human being can experience. Not all are subject to it...'
'...I saw a nice black heavy-looking cloud sailing by just now, and I can get the electrical machine out in five minutes to draw it down.'
'From a distance it could resolve the cosmic rays reflected from various substances.'
'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'
'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
