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"I've come across more and more people who've actually tried reading science fiction and can't make it make sense."
- Samuel R. Delany
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| Hand Computer | ||
| A small pocket-sized computing device. |
As far as I know, this is the first use of this phrase in science-fiction.
| Foster stared at his hand computer with distaste. It worked well enough but every operation had to be manually controlled and the answers were obtained in code. Now if he could use the school computer — Well, why dream, he felt conspicuous enough, as it was, carrying a hand computer under his arm every evening as he left his office. |
| Technovelgy from The Dead Past,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1956 Additional resources -
|
Niven and Pournelle used this phrase in Mote in God’s Eye:
There was a link. When the crew and scientists convened abort HMS Lenin to discuss the HMS McCarthur they logged in to their pocket computers and linked to the ship's main computer. When the xenobiologists convened on New Scotland to discuss the Motie representitives they tested the link between their hand computers and the main computer. When the Brownie took the pocket computer apart and then reassembled it, Sally tested it by linking to the ship's computer.
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Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
