Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Internet and PC (1974)

"...and videos of cats."

I find it endearing that our visions of the future always see the best (or worst) of humanity, but never the mundane or banal.

> He also said some nice things about communication devices "in your vest pocket," but I can't find it.

I had a search. Maybe this one?

"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket."

http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1926-01-30.htm

though I think that's actually one of the less interesting things to be found in that interview... Tesla really was quite the interesting person, it seems.

There's a good case to be made that the first personal computer was introduced in 1971, and had actually ceased production in 1973: http://www.kenbak-1.net/

The Altair 8800 is more important as a predecessor on the main line of microcomputer development, but the basic idea of a computer a single individual human being who wasn't massively wealthy could own was actually, to some small extent, achieved a few years before anything that would evolve into the rest of the microcomputer line was in existence. (To be technical, the Kenbak-1 can't be in the microcomputer line because it wasn't a microcomputer, because its CPU was built out of discrete components as opposed to having been a microprocessor.)

There's the interesting question of what developments Clarke were aware of at the time, but yes, multiple people were envisioning these things back then.

Many of them were also extrapolating from Vannevar Bush's Memex, as described in As We May Think, in the Atlantic in 1945 [2] taking account the intervening advances in technology.

[1] http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...

Mind you, this is after Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" and Memex, which got many people excited about the idea. This in turn was influenced by earlier investigations by Davis and Draeger in 1935 on searching with microfilm.

In the last year I've been researching earlier information systems, including those of the punch card era. Calvin Mooers, in his paper "Making Information Retrieval Pay", which coined the term "information retrieval", proposes a mechanical search engine called DOKEN which could handle Heinlein's proposed query (see http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=4243 ), except that "Professor Irwin Corey" is too specific to be an index query using Zatocoding.

Seems the various carriers and ISPs have discovered that they earn more by offering package deals, because the customer is likely to overshoot on the package to avoid the overcharge fees.

But in many places net access was/is metered, by virtue of it being done over the metered phone network. For me the biggest deal with DSL and later was that the metering of dial-up went away (tho at least one ISP tried to introduce a stair step payment system).

"Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign."

Sure, it doesn't use the language and notion of the computer, but how important is computing per se to 95% of Internet users?

Did he make that statement elsewhere?

In this video he just said "it would make it possible to live anywhere we like. Any businessman or executive could live almost anywhere on earth and still do his business". That's largely true today.