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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
 |
| Robot Vending Machine | ||
| Machinery displaces news boys selling papers on street corners. |
| Mr.
WILLIAM WINDSOR, a hard- MR.headed, grim-visaged newspaperman of forty, stood nonchalantly on the moving walk that swept him briskly down Fifth Avenue. He smiled with pardonable pride as he listened to the raucous magnetic speakers shouting out the phrases that drew excited mobs to the robot vending machines which sold the yet damp news strips of printed shorthand...
Bill stepped off the moving sidewalk by the corner vending machine, dropped a coin in the slot, and received a copy of the damp shorthand strip delivered fresh from the presses by magnetic tube. He read his story, standing in a busy street that rustled quietly with the whir of moving walks and the barely audible drone of the thousands of electrically driven heliocars which spun smoothly along on rubber-tired wheels, or easily lifted themselves to skimming flight upon whirling helicopters. |
| Technovelgy from The Prince of Space,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Amazing Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the homotropic news vending machine from The Game Players of Titan (1963) by Philip K. Dick.
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'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
'The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag.'
'Across the ancient sea floor a dozen tall, blue-sailed Martian sand ships floated, like blue smoke.'
'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
