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"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Picphone | ||
| A small telephone that has a screen to show pictures. |
Who thought about playing games on a phone in the 1970's? Only Philip K. Dick.
| The left wall of the cab opened and a picphone slid out, cord twisted in a baroque loop....
Seating himself, Buckman began an idle colortone game with the picphone; he flashed the flags of various extinct nations. |
| Technovelgy from Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1974 Additional resources -
|
Although the "picphone" is not a portable cell phone, it is still an interesting presentation of an idea that didn't come true for another forty years. No one thought about playing some sort of a game with their phone until after the turn of the 20th century. I grew up in the 1960's and a telephone was a single purpose device for making phone calls.
See also the pocketphone from Heinlein's 1953 novel Assignment in Eternity. As far as I know, the first reference to a pocket-sized telephone is in Heinlein's 1948 novel Space Cadet - the portable telephone.
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'...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.'
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'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'
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'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
