Arthur C Clarke
Click to viewThe title says that Arthur C. Clarke predicted the internet. That's not quite true, ARPANET was running when this video was made, so as small as it was - it was an internet. Nor did he predict the PC - The Mother of All Demos was in 1968.
I'm not sure who first dreamed of a PC in every house, Bill Gates famously had that dream in the early 80s. I wouldn't be surprised if Clarke was the first to believe that it was actually going to happen, and that computers and the internet would become as much a part of our lives as telephones had become to the people of the 70s.
I remember fantasizing about the internet of the future when I was a kid. That might be weird, but what's weirder is reading instructions on building your own modem and wishing hard that one day I would get to connect to the net. It was this childhood dream that cost our family a fair amount of money in the days of Compuserve.
Anyway, even Clarke's grand vision of the future is hedged a little. He doesn't want to predict that everyone will have a home computer exactly, unsure if they would ever become practical and useful. He seems to imply that the future might be in dumb terminals. Or at least seriously dummed down terminals. Granted, we don't all have the power of a mainframe on our desktops - but it's not that far off. I guess I could outfit my computer to be a reasonable server (though not competitive with specialist kit, obviously), it would certainly have been seen as an awesome server of fantasticness to Clarke (circa 1977) though.
I am going to be speaking to a documentary maker later in the week. If my life is suitably interesting, I might feature in their documentary. They have made some reasonably known documentaries for the TV such as Small Teen Big World. I don't hold up much hope that I'll be interesting enough for them - but I guess talking to them is probably going to be the most interesting thing I did this week.