Science Fiction here and now…

I was unpacking an LCD flat panel monitor and Beth remarked that more and more twen-cen sci-fi concepts have been actualized. Flat panels were the stuff of fantasy in the earlier days of Ferdinand Braun’s cathode ray tube. Fifty years later, space saving, energy efficient, mobile, scalable sized electronic displays were still the stuff of some fictionalized future.  Now three dimensional displays are right around the corner.

Consider the memory cube: John Varley, one of my faves, presents one instance of high density storage in his 1976 story “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.” (…a man who mentally inhabits a lion in the Kenya Disneyland must live temporarily within the virtual reality of his memory storage cube while his misplaced body is located.) We’re not there yet… at least we haven’t put limitless storage in small packages on the mass market yet, but 4GB flash drives have been available for a while. Science fiction stuff.

But the most ubiquitous advance, the one that tickles Beth the most, is the cell phone. With all the personal functions turned on, a cell phone is mighty close to the universal information appliance that IBM is looking for and that Dick Tracy possessed. Beth observes that one of the coolest things about the cell phone is that everyone has their own phone number. In the dark ages – think 1980 – phones were tied to locations. If you paid the bill, you might have thought it was “your” phone number, but phones were tied to locations, stationary instruments fixed by the hard-wiring of the switched network. When you moved, you got a new number.  And there was a directory. Not only was there a directory by name, but there was also an address directory so telemarketeers could selectively annoy people with messages targeted to their neighborhood, street, or household.  Before Beth mentioned it, I hadn’t thought about the fact that now I own my number and can port it to one cell service provider or another and there is NO DIRECTORY. When I move, I can keep the same number, even if I move out of the switched exchange where land-line numbers are allocated. Cell service doesn’t care. This idea that everyone has there own number is the stuff of science fiction. And the cell phone is just one wireless modality, one that wouldn’t have surprised Ferdinand Braun. And what about Voice over IP?

Listen. Did you hear that? It sounded like the clatter of a teletype machine — the death throes of the Networkasaurus. But the seeds of its smaller, faster and more flexible successor are already growing in your personal computer, telephone, and cable system. — Frank Catalano, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Airwaves