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Old 01-16-2018, 01:50 PM   #1306
bgalbrecht
Wizard
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Richwood View Post
I agree though, to change dates in near contemporary science fiction to try and keep it in the future is dumb and will seldom work. Need a total rewrite to introduce technology advances like personal computers, internet, cellular telephones etc. In 10 years or less need to include self driving cars and who knows what new technology. Science fiction can be so wrong about the future. I remember stories from the 1930s through the 1960s which had engineers in space still using slide rules for doing calculations and huge computers, some still analog. A current cellular phone has far more calculating power than the huge vacuum tube computer I worked on circa 1965, and it was already long obsolete even then.
One of my favorite examples of this is Robert Heinlein's Starman Jones, in which all the spaceship navigation is done with manual readings, then they are entered into a computer after looking up the the decimal to binary values in a book, and when the computer is finished calculating, they convert it back to decimal by looking up the binary to decimal values! I believe that was already obsolete by the time Heinlein wrote it.
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