Ultra-portable terminals

[John Esak]

>
> I see that trend continuing and as all the appliences get smarter, things
> like your pda and phone will not have to be especially smarter
> than anything
> else in order for you to have fully rich, powerful, flexable, convenient
> experience.
>
> Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/

You are not going nearly far out enough... being a science fiction buff, I
would have thought you would wax higher.  My favorite science fiction
author, A.E. Van Vogt, wrote a book called The Sylkie (sp) about 30 years
ago, maybe 1973 or so. (Of course he did his best writing in the 40's.)
Anyway, this is a fantastic book which describes the future where all
devices get smaller and smaller, until they are just worn as bracelets, and
jewelry... then they start to become implanted in the skin of certain folks.
In fact the human being begins to add a complete "electronic" skin, which
does all the things that need doing... from capturing and storing data to
projecting images here and there, processing air and food, providing
transportation (anti-gravitic flight)... to complete isolation from all the
elements so that flight into outer space becomes possible for everyone,
individually. :-)  Now, let's see, this guy also predicted controlled atomic
power, and every sort of device we now take for granted, but didn't exist in
the 1940's. Asimov was doing the same thing, coming up with such things as
the hand-held calculator/computer in the first Foundation book.

Did I ever mention that I talked with Isaac Asimov on CompuServe for 4 hours
late one night back in about 1980! Talk about genius's. (They wrote a
special Scripsit for him back at Tandy... had his own logo and everything.)

John