The tricorder from Star Trek is well-established as the formative concept for the modern day cell phone. And the idea of a pocket-computer goes all the way back to the calculators developed by TI, designed explicitly against the size of the CEO’s shirt pocket to guarantee it would fit.
Miniaturization has been a long time coming. It goes back to clockmakers and glass cutters, trying to turn large scale instruments into portable devices. I don’t think it is outrageous to suggest a pocket computer was in the future back in the 1960s/70s.
I do think the speed at which we got here caught people off-guard. But it also set this fantastic expectation for what we’ll do next, such that people speculate on faster-than-light travel and AI holograms and robot battle suits and immortality drugs more freely when they can point to “pocket computer” as an already realized possibility.
The tricorder from Star Trek is well-established as the formative concept for the modern day cell phone. And the idea of a pocket-computer goes all the way back to the calculators developed by TI, designed explicitly against the size of the CEO’s shirt pocket to guarantee it would fit.
Miniaturization has been a long time coming. It goes back to clockmakers and glass cutters, trying to turn large scale instruments into portable devices. I don’t think it is outrageous to suggest a pocket computer was in the future back in the 1960s/70s.
I do think the speed at which we got here caught people off-guard. But it also set this fantastic expectation for what we’ll do next, such that people speculate on faster-than-light travel and AI holograms and robot battle suits and immortality drugs more freely when they can point to “pocket computer” as an already realized possibility.