Conference noted::sf

    H. G. Wells also predicted the tank in one of his short stories.
    
        Although submersibles of various sorts existed prior to Verne,
    it was the Nautilis from TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA
    that was the "father" of the true submarine. It's also interesting
    that Cape Canaveral is fairly close to the site that Verne's Gun
    Club used for their moonship-launching cannon.
    
    Perhaps the most famous example is the short story "Deadline", by
    Cleve Cartmill that appeared in ANALOG in 1944, which had uncannily
    accurate detail about the atom bomb, so much so that the Justice
    Department investigated to see if there was a leak in Manhattan
    Project security.
    	But this wasn't unique. Philip Wylie was also investigated for
    a similar story. And many other stories long before had predicted
    atomic energy as a power source.
    
    Nuclear power-plant disasters such as TMI and Chernobyl were "pre-
    dicted" in Lester del Rey's NERVES, originally written in the 40's.
    
    One of the more obscure predictions is Nevil (ON THE BEACH) Shute's
    quasi-sf novel, NO HIGHWAY (filmed, with Jimmy Stewart, as NO HIGHWAY
    IN THE SKY), which was about metal fatigue causing airplane crashes.
    Not long after that, planes actually started crashing for that reason.
    
    --- jerry

                And don't forget the communications satellite 
        "pioneered" by Arthur C. Clarke.
                
                
                        /s/     Bob

    It seems to me that modern industrial robotics is a fantasy that
    finally found a place in the real world.  
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    RE .2:
    
    I don't think Clarke's "prediction" of communication satellites
    was SF. I've heard (but not sure) that he holds a patent on the
    idea.
    
    sm

    Re .4:
    
    No, he just wishes he had thought to get a patent on the idea.
    
    
    Re .0:
    
    I remember my father telling me a story about people finding a deserted
    ship of another race.  Naturally, they start examining it, but they
    can't figure out the controls.  Wires lead from various devices being
    controlled into small, black, rectangular blocks.  Wires also lead from
    control switches into the blocks.  The blocks appear uniform; x-ray
    analysis shows they are pretty much homogenous.  The investigators
    don't know what to make of this.  Further analysis shows the blocks are
    not homogenous in one respect; there are varying electron densities
    inside them . . . .  Does anybody know this story?
    
    
    				-- edp 

Heinlein had a story where he not only predicted the Bomb, but he 
even predicted the Cold War.  It ends with the hero asking "What do
you do when you're locked in a room full of people pointing guns at other?"
He didn't have an answer, and neither do we.

Heinlein also predicted the mechanical hand, the sort that are used
for handling radioactive materials, in a story called "Waldo", and
they're called waldos to this day. 

In the opening section of "Foundation", Hari Seldon uses a pocket 
calculator that has red, glowing numerals.  It manipulates equations, 
though, so he must have Macsyma inside it.

re: robots and computers

Robots didn't really turn out the way we envisioned.  SF writers 
expected them to be mechanical people, or replacements for human slaves,
and it hasn't happened.  Won't happen soon either, because the chaos
and complexity of the normal world is too much for any near-term 
machines to handle.  Instead, robots are just machine tools with feedback.

Ditto computers.  The only computer application most writers were 
ever interested in was artificial intelligence, and that has turned 
out to be an extremely minor part of the impact of the machines.

re: comsats

Clarke proposed the geosynchronous communication satellite in an 
article in Wireless World (an English ham magazine) in the late forties.
Not only did he get the basic idea down, but he even got the 
frequencies and powers right.

re: .5

I think that the mysterious ship you mentioned was an example John
Campbell used in one of his editorials.  He was asking what would
happen if a fairly modern piece of technology, say, a ramjet-powered
cruise missile, was sent back to the 1930s.  What would they make of
it?  It has an aerodynamic shape, so it looks like it would fly, but
the wings are very small and there's no propellor.  There's not even a
turbine in a ramjet. The control is electronic, OK fine, but there are
no tubes, just black bits of plastic with little pieces of silicon in
them.  The metallurgy of the time could not detect the difference in
doping for the transistors, and quantum mechanics was just getting
underway, so the operation of the silicon would be incomprehensible.
They didn't even have digital logic back then.   The front of the
missile must be a bomb because it has some high explosive, but what's
this odd gray metal (plutonium hadn't been discovered), and why it is
put together with lithium and deuterium?  And what happens if you
press this button ...  no more laboratory.  And that's only fifty
years ago! 

/jlr 

    Granted that robots and computers have not turned out as envisioned,
    I still think that the fiction has a large part in steering the
    industry.  AI may *in fact* be a small part of modern computing,
    but it was always at the back of everyone's head.
    
    The space program is in a similar situation.  We dreamed it before
    we did it, and what we would LIKE to do in it is still conditioned
    by the dream.  I fear me the shuttle program got a lot of push (it
    now looks like maybe too much push) from the feeling that the space
    program really ought to involve people in space ships, without a
    lot of thought to whether people in ships were the best way to reach
    the scientific, industrial, or military goals they were used for.
    I suspect that when the shuttles start going up again, they will
    go up less often, on missions more nearly limited to those things
    that only the shuttle can do.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    > Heinlein had a story where he not only predicted the Bomb, but he even
    > predicted the Cold War.  It ends with the hero asking "What do you do
    > when you're locked in a room full of people pointing guns at other?" He
    > didn't have an answer, and neither do we. 
      
    Actually, Heinlein spoke of radioactive dust as the weapon, rather
    than a bomb, but yes he did predict the nuclear stalemate that we
    now face.
    
    Isaac Asimov, in one of his articles, mentioned that this latter
    prediction is much more important than predicting technology (ala
    predicting the bomb.)  To paraphrase him, "...it's not television,
    it's the sitcom; it's not the automobile, it's the traffic jam."
    
    This view makes Heinlein's prediction that much more remarkable.
    Oh, by the way, Heinlein recognized the insanity of this sort of
    stalemate from the beginning.  His title for the story?
    
    
    
    			Solution Unsatisfactory
    
    					andrew

    re:.5 re:.4
    
    There's a joke of sorts that's floated around for the last 10 or
    so years (at elast, since I first heard it) that Clarke has probably
    made more money by lecturing on how he would have made money if
    he had the foresight to patent the commsat than he would have by
    patentning the thing in the first place.
    
    --- jerry

        but of course, he'd probably have made the same amount of
        money lecturing on how he *had* had the foresight to patent
        it, and would in addition have made the money from the patent
        itself.  :-)
        
        	/dave

    re .9, .10:
    
    Actually, he discussed the idea of patenting it with a patent attorney,
    and was told that the idea was unpatentable!  [He wrote an article
    on it.] The reason: during the time-slice when he could legitimately
    have applied for a patent, the technology wasn't in place that would
    have enabled anyone to put a geosynchronous satellite into orbit.
    Part of the way that the patent process works is that you have to
    be able to make it work.  Since it was theoretically but not
    practically realizable, the patent couldn't have been granted.
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    

        .11:  Phooie.  Realism takes all the fun out of the discussion!
        
        	:-) :-)
        
        	/dave

    	The great rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard really showed himself
    to be way ahead of his time by writing an article in the 1920's
    about plans for humanity's escape from the Sol System when the
    Sun expands into a red giant star and engulfs the terrestrial planets
    before dying.  He envisioned huge starships which would carry away
    our far-distant descendants in suspended animation to other star
    systems.
    
    	The thing to remember, that though this is no longer a new topic
    in SF, nor has it obviously happened yet (if ever), is that Goddard
    - like several early SF writers - thought of such incredible ideas
    in a time when Goddard's simple concept of sending an unmanned rocket
    to Earth's Moon brought tons of ridicule upon him.
    
    	Goddard ranks up there with the likes of the Russian rocket
    pioneer Tsilovsky, who envisioned space stations, among other space-age
    inventions.  In fact, in 1896, Goddard once envisioned sending a
    spacecraft to Mars to orbit the planet and take photographs of its
    surface - in 1896!
                                                     
    	Larry
    

    re .13
    
    The Russian guy's name is Tsiolkovsky.  He's now got a lunar crater
    named after him.
    
    len.
    

    Holograms, videophones, credit cards, alloys stronger than steel,
    plastic, etc.  The list goes on.
    
    Wells also wrote about planes with batwings dropping bombs long
    before air power was recognized as a potent weapon; aerial bombing
    changed the face of war.  
    						Don
    
    P.S. Wells called tanks "Land Ironclads".  (Which triggered my memory; 
         now I know where you got your last batch of info, Jerry!  And all 
         this time I thought you were pulling it out of your head.)  :-)
    

    re:.15
    
    Ah, but I only used that to check up on a few things. Most of it
    *did* come out of my head.
    
    --- jerry

    In order, too!  We'll buy it.  (Your teacher wouldn't, tho'.)

    	I once heard somewhere that Edgar Allen Poe had authored an
    essay which, despite being poorly written, had somehow anticipated
    the Big Bang theory of the creation of the Universe by some fifty
    years!
    
    	Does anyone know anymore about this essay?
    
    	Larry
    

    re:.17
    
    In order? Really? I hadn't noticed. Let's see... 
    
    No, not quite, but close (Wells, Verne, and Shute are in a different
    spot than del Rey, Cartmill, and Wylie). It really *is* coincidence.
    I wrote the bulk of the note before the consultation. After the
    consultation, I added the bits about Wylie and Shute.
    
    --- jerry

This isn't exactly sf, but is a pretty startling bit of early
cosmology. It's from the introduction to "Meditations" by Marcus
Aurelius, the philosopher and Roman emperor. The introduction writer
(Maxwell Staniforth) is discussing the physics of the Stoic
philosophers: 

"To explain the process of creation, the Stoics relied on the theory 
of tension.  From the fact that most bodies expand when heated it is 
clear that heat exerts pressure.  Accordingly the Mind-Fire, in its 
primal state of intense heat and correspondingly high pressure, at 
once begins to expand; and this brings about a proportionate 
slackening of tension.  As a result, some of the divine fire cools 
and becomes visible as the humbler element of earthly fire; this 
again, as the tension continues to weaken, partially condenses into 
air; and portions of the air, in turn, solidify into water and 
earth.  At this stage a movement in the opposite direction sets in; 
the vital heat contained in these four elements begins to assert its 
creative energy, and to materialize in the countless shapes and forms 
which compose the universe.... At long last, however, a time comes 
when this ever-mounting energy reaches a pitch of intensity at which 
it becomes the devourer of its own creation: one after another the 
different forms and substances dissolve back into their original 
elements, the water evaperates into air, the air turns to flames, and 
finally the universe disappears in a grand conflagration which leaves 
nothing surviving but the primordial Mind-Fire itself.  Thereupon the 
whole process straightaway begins again; the successive acts of 
creation repat themselves, and the pattern of history starts to unroll 
as before..."

Not a bad description of the Big Bang!  Second century AD.

/jlr

    re A.C.Clarke's comsats:
    
    The thought just hit me, even if he HAD gotten a patent, it would
    have expired before any were actually put up there.
    Patents are only 17 yrs, right? 1945 he wrote the article, so it
    would have expired around '62-3. When was the first geo-synch sattelite
    put up?
    
    sm

    I'm not a patent attorney, but I suspect he eiother could have gotten
    an extension, or, as with most patents, he could have broken it
    down in such a way as to patent _parts_ of the basic idea long enough
    for technology to catch up to him.
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    

    	As can be seen in the 1968 movie classic, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY,
    Stanley Kubrick did his science homework.  One area which I
    particularly find interesting (in relation to DEC) is that of HAL
    9000's CIRCUIT BOARDS - you know, the ones Dave Bowman was pulling
    out to "control" HAL ("Daisy, Daisy!"). 
    	HAL's circuit boards were TRANSLUCENT.  At first to me they
    looked like there was NOTHING on or in them, and I figured either
    Kubrick was either being damn symbolic ("Where do thoughts truly
    lie?" or something like that), or he was showing a technology that
    1968 engineers were planning to have by 2001.  
    	I asked an engineer on my floor about the translucency of HAL's
    circuits ("Damn it, Jim, I'm a tech writer, not an engineer!"),
    and discovered that such things are being worked upon TODAY, not
    fifteen years from now (Course, HAL was made operational in 1992).
    
    	Kubrick was on target again!
    
    	Larry
    

    re .23:
    
    Those circuit boards were memory boards, I figured they were
    holographic. 
    	In fact, there was an article in Aviation Week about
    two or three years ago about a memory system the Navy was(is) working
    on. It's called photon-echo memory and the storage element is
    just a cube of glass. Apparently a 1" cube could store many Gigabytes
    of data. The only problem is that it is dynamic and requires refreshing
    every second or so. If that is what was in HAL, plugging the boards
    back in would not have restored his memory.

                  /
                 (  ___
                  ) ///
                 / 
    

    Yeah, but pulling the boards seems unlikely to have the effect of
    slowing down HAL's speech output (i.e., like a tape recorder sluggishly
    grinding to a stop).  I'd expect the speech quality to be unimpaired
    but the semantic content to go haywire.  Instead HAL "regressed".
    This scene always struck me as a cheap effect; the transparent
    (I recall them as transparent (i.e., glasslike) rather than translucent
    (milky)) boards were perfectly acceptable in comparison.

    len.
    

    I was interested to observe the differences between HAL's dying
    words in 2001 and his reviving words in 2010.  As remarked in .25,
    the first movie had HAL slow down like a gramophone winding down
    -- not very likely.  The second movie had him recapitulate the
    evolution of synthetic speech generation -- first a sort of modulated
    moan, then something like the side-band talk of the "Galactica"
    Cylons, then something like DECtalk, then his old voice.
    
    This second progression is more believable, but more believable
    still would be a period starting with DECtalk-quality voice and
    marked by inanities like error messages and extreem literalness
    of understanding -- a psychological rather than merely acoustic
    re-development.  However, that would have been slow going.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

An old sf novel, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and the movie made from
it by F. Troufeau(?) cannot be said to be "on target", but there are 
a couple elements worth mentioning:

Bradbury describes wall-size television, the movie is more modest with
a large screen on one wall. Currently, screens about half the size of 
the movie version are available within reasonable consumer prices. This
is no surprise technologically, but Bradbury uses the physical space
which the television occupies as a symbol of the psychological space
that it occupies within residents of this future time.

The programming on television seems to be slowly drifting towards the
programming Bradbury descibes. Bradbury descibes the "Family", and the
movie, I believe, echos this closely. The family is a group of (ficticious)
people with social problems which are solved by "correct social behavior",
and in many ways the programming resembles a cross between a sitcom and
a soap opera. When soap operas rather suddenly blossomed on evening TV,
I was reminded strongly of Bradbury's "Family".

A number of Bradbury's stories reflect this concern with the demise of
reading and discussion and the rise of television, with accompanying 
alienation of people, from the real world and from each other.

At the end of Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist watches the destruction
of the city he has escaped from (not recommended...), reflecting on
the TV telling the residents, in matter-of-fact way, about the bombs
which are now a mile, now a yard, now an inch from their homes...

...and goodnight from NBC news.

Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Path: decwrl!amdcad!lll-crg!lll-lcc!well!singer
Subject: Re: Voice of HAL-9000
Posted: 5 Oct 86 09:45:26 GMT
Organization: Whole Earth Lectronic Link, Sausalito CA
 
I recently heard a tape of some of the first computer-synthesized voice
stuff, from 1963 or so, and was shocked to hear the machine singing "Daisy".
The fellow who played the tape assured us that it was, in fact, the
source from which the singing in '2001' was derived.  (Not that they
used that tape or anything, but that they did "Daisy" in honor of, or
following from, that work.)  Anyone got any comment?
 
(The guy who played the tape was Connie Willis's husband, Courtney.  He is
a science teacher at, I think, the highschool level, and was doing a demo
of some fun things at a tiny con in Colorado Springs.)
 
Cheers
	Jon

    Not only did they do "Daisy" in 2001, in 2010 HAL recapitulates
    the evolution of computer-generated speech.  On his first run, he
    talks like a vocoder, then he's up to Bell Labs level, then side-band
    (which is really a bit of a cheat), then DECtalk or something that
    sounds almost exaclty like it, then the human actor delivering his
    lines.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    I recently got an old, old book from the '50's about the coming
    age of space travel.  It is interesting to watch its hits and misses.
    It did rather well on spacesuits.  They have a cute picture of a
    couple standing on the moon in '50's pulp magazine suits (goldfish
    bowl helmets, the girl in something like a bikini, everything skin
    tight) standing next to a projected real spacesuit (remarkably like
    a real Gemini suit).  The other good illustration is of a "space
    scooter" for hauling loads around a space station.  The author remarks
    that it is hard for illustrators to get over the feeling that flying
    things must be streamlined, but that this time the artist has made
    a special effort.  The result looks believably angular and ugly,
    not unlike some of the unmanned probes we've sent out.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

                 Lotus - Introduces smart add-on to 1-2-3

   Lotus on Monday introduced HAL, an add-on program to its best-selling 1-2-3
 electronic spreadsheet software that allows users to give commands in English
 phrases and to undo mistakes easily. HAL has a suggested list price of $150
 and is expected to be shipped to stores around the middle of November,
 assuming it passes final testing, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company said. HAL
 gives 1-2-3 users the ability to reverse the last operation executed, using an
 Undo command; to highlight relationships in a range of numbers; to link one
 spreadsheet to another; and to keep a log of commands for review and
 correction, among other things. HAL takes up 108 kilobytes of memory in a
 personal computer and is recommended for computers with at least 512K of main
 memory.

	{AP News Wire, 6-Oct-86, 14:41}

Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Path: decwrl!amdcad!lll-crg!rutgers!caip!daemon
Subject: HAL singing "Bicycle Built for Two"
Posted: 7 Oct 86 22:56:19 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
 
From: Lynn Gold <Lynn%PANDA@SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.EDU>
 
According to Ed Feigenbaum, the first song to be sung by a computer
using voice-synthesis was, in fact, "Bicycle Built for Two" (the
correct name for "Daisy").  At a gathering a few years ago, he mentioned
that this was what inspired HAL's singing in "2001: A Space Odyssey."
 
--Lynn

Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Path: decwrl!decvax!ittatc!dcdwest!sdcsvax!jack!man!crash!victoro
Subject: Re: HAL singing "Bicycle Built for Two"
Posted: 8 Oct 86 21:55:09 GMT
Organization: Crash TS, El Cajon, CA
Posted: Wed Oct  8 17:55:09 1986
 
In article <3598@caip.RUTGERS.EDU> LYNN@PANDA writes:
>From: Lynn Gold <Lynn%PANDA@SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.EDU>
>
>According to Ed Feigenbaum, the first song to be sung by a computer
>using voice-synthesis was, in fact, "Bicycle Built for Two" (the
>correct name for "Daisy").  At a gathering a few years ago, he mentioned
>that this was what inspired HAL's singing in "2001: A Space Odyssey."
>
>--Lynn
>-------
 
In fact I have the recording...
Found on side two of the _Philadelphia_Computer_Music_Festival_ from
Creative Computing (CR101) is the 1963 Bell Labs "Synthesized Computer
Speech Demonstration." lasting 2:20 by D.H. Van Lenten.
 
According to the jacket each of the nine control for the 34 phonetic sounds
were individually keypunched onto cards and processed by a two-part program
to produce a magnetic tape.  This was then converted by a second program
into an audio tape.
 
The record even has him singing to a synthesized piano..
 
(Eat your heart out Max Headroom!)
  

Path: muscat!decwrl!ucbvax!OZ.AI.MIT.EDU!MINSKY
From: MINSKY@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: SPACE Digest V8 #103
Message-ID: <MINSKY.12365517600.BABYL@MIT-OZ>
Date: 10 Jan 88 16:56:00 GMT
References: <ota.at.angband.s1.gov>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 18
 
    George Michaelson remarks:
 
>If you look at any Western TV wildtrack of computer room activity,
>they do not show a black cube two-foot square with one red light on,
>they go for a tennis court of minions loading tape into chunky
>drives.  ...  People need a heavy handed motif to get the technology
>image re-inforced, we might now be impressed by oh-so-cool no-buttons
>boxes but whose to say that will still be true in ten years time?
 
    When Stanley Kubrick was making 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, he invited
me to look at the HAL 9000 computer.  The modules had very fancy
engravings and indicators.  I said I thought that all the status data
would come out the pins and no one would look at anything but
centralized display terminals in the year 2001 (I agreed the machine
would speak very well, but was not convinced it would understand
continuous speech input reliably).  Kubrick scrapped that set and
replaced it by the plain black modules seen in the 1968 film.  I
forget whether they have a red LED on them.  I was horrified to see
all that nice artwork go away, but Kubrick would not compromise. 

    I know its a bit late, but there is a book called "Tongues of the
    Moon" (I think), forgotten who by. In that, the good guys use Neutron
    Weapons to Kill the people and leave the machinery  OK. Sound familiar?
    
    Rob

    Tongues of the Moon was written by Phillip Jose Farmer.
    
    					Don (who didn't have to search	
    					    this time...)