Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
In later books. In earlier ones, his characters used mechanical devices, like circular slide rules. Andy Libby's interest as an early character was his ability to do math in his head that everyone else had to use a calculator or a slide rule for.
He did have things like ebook viewers, which implied that sort of capability, but he simply presented them as existing and didn't go into how they worked.
For that matter, Asimov's Foundation series has a character using what we would consider voice recognition software to write an essay for a class, but again, he just presents it as something they can do, and doesn't try to explain how it works.
Heinlein told a story about unrolling a sheet of butcher paper on his kitchen table, and he and his wife Virginia then independently worked a problem in orbital ballistics to check that a spacecraft could get from point X to point Y in time Z as required by a story. (He wanted Virginia to cross-check him because he thought her math was better than his.) He told this story to a visitng West Point cadet who said "But sir, why didn't you just use a computer?", and was properly abashed when Heinlein replied "My dear boy, this was in 1947!" 
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Dennis |
For the book 'Destination Moon'. And the cadet didn't get it right away.