Quote:
Originally Posted by BenG
Tom Swift (or maybe it was Tom Swift Jr.) invented several specialized "little idiot" desktop computers. There was one for calculating orbits,one for translations, etc. They had "a million transistors per square inch".
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That must have been very late Tom Swift Jr. In the TS Jr books I grew up with (the first twenty or so), he still used a slide rule.
In the Tom Corbett Space Cadet series, the cadets studied from book tapes. In fact, one plot line starts with trouble over there being only one set of tapes on a subject, and they don't share nicely the way their mothers taught them. The creators envisioned electronic reading, but not the ease of copying. I'm not sure
anyone foresaw that.