Arthur C. Clarke, You Da Bomb!

This is my first blog post fully composed and researched on my iPad, so I thought it would be fitting to write a blog entry related to the device.

Remember the old Miss Cleo infomercials? I do. They were so funny. But past Miss Cleo demoing how she could identify the fathers of many babies, the best part of each commercial would be where some female caller would say "Miss Cleo, you da bomb!".

Miss Cleo may have been able to solve Maury Povich-esque matters, but Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, had a much more accurate and relevant premonition concerning technology of our time. Although he was about 7 years off in the title, this description of a device in the novel could very well be attributed to the Kindle or the iPad:


“When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug in his foolscap-size newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth.


One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers…Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.


Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.


It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg. ”

Note how freakishly accurate Clarke was with the description of what sounds more like an iPad than a Kindle, and his coining the term Newspad. I use the Wall Street Journal app on my iPad, and that is a pretty dead on description of the app. Even Safari, Apple's default web browser, fits that bill pretty comfortably. That is pretty unreal.

Many years ago, somewhere in the lineage of records, 8 tracks, and cassettes, American Bandstand emcee Dick Clark made a statement saying that one day in the future, people would not only be able to easily take their entire music collections anywhere they went, but would be able to pick and choose whatever music they wanted to listen to on their car stereos. That statement became true with the advent of MP3 players and satellite radios, but Arthur Clarke made his prediction farther back in the past with incredible accuracy. For that, I must say, Arthur C. Clarke, You Da Bomb!