Via Mashable/Tech: 11 Astounding Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True. Here's the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke describing the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in 1968:
“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…”
I've been re-reading some of my SF novels from the 1970s and 80s, and the technology I predicted for circa 2015 generally looks a bit dated: microfiches instead of memory sticks, and great clunky computers with not a laptop in sight.
But in Gryphon, published in 1989, I imagined a kind of web, the Database, invented by aliens. Humans would "dive" to search it in a kind of trance, while finding very little they could understand. If I'd predicted Google, the story's plot would have been far different.
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