I find it fascinating as a demonstration of William Gibons "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" how much tech like this turns out to be much older than what people today expect. Another example would be video-telephony (a cctv-like commercial and publicly available video-telephony network operated in Germany 1936 onwards; it was "just" fixed booths at the post-offices of a few cities, but still; and the idea dated back to just a couple of years after the telephone)... Turns out you can write a lot of very prescient-sounding scifi by taking tech that already exist but isn't widely known, and positing a world where it is everywhere... (half of what people sometimes think Jules Verne "predicted" for example where things that existed in his time - including the Pantelegraph "fax" service)
> Turns out you can write a lot of very prescient-sounding scifi by taking tech that already exist but isn't widely known, and positing a world where it is everywhere
I think this is one reason 'Shockwave Rider' [0] from 1975 still holds up quite well today. IIRC the author (John Brunner) had people using their phones to access remote computers and didn't go into tech details of how they actually did this. When I read it more recently, it held up much better than (say) Arthur C. Clarke novels from the same era, because Clarke as a hard-SF technologist tried e.g. to predict what future gadgets might look like and how they might work.
