############################################################################# # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 # 45678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 # # Degrees in electronics, ex-B, ex-LUT, ex-GM. # Not married, no children, does not live in East Sussex. # # Next question? :-) markMLl.wp08 .AT. telemetry .DOT. co.uk # ###############################################################################
"There is no doubt that the day will come, maybe when you and I are forgotten, when copper wires, gutta-percha coverings, and iron sheathings will be relegated to the Museum of Antiquities.
"Then, when a person wants to telegraph to a friend, he knows not where, he will call an electromagnetic voice, which will be heard loud by him who has the electromagnetic ear but will be silent to everyone else.
"He will call 'Where are you?' and the reply will come 'I am at the bottom of the coal-mine' or 'Crossing the Andes' or 'In the middle of the Pacific'; or perhaps no reply will come at all, and he may then conclude that his friend is dead."
Professor W. E. Ayrton speaking at a lecture at the Imperial Institute in 1897.
"But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.
… "She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people - an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something 'good enough' had long since been accepted by our race."
The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster, 1909.
"You might think that to convey the full sense imagery of the swamp, some immense bandwidth would be necessary. In fact, that was not so … A typical Portal link was around fifty thousand baud, far narrower than even a flat video channel."
True Names by Vernor Vinge, 1981.
"The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist - it's just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere - none of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the worldwide fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring at the graphic representations - the user interfaces - of a myriad different pieces of software.
… "He knows one thing: The Metaverse has now become a place where you can get killed. Or at least have your brain reamed out to the point where you might as well be dead. This is a radical change in the nature of the place. Guns have come to Paradise.
"It serves them right, he realizes now. They made the place too vulnerable. They figured that the worst thing that could happen was that a virus might get transferred into your computer and force you to ungoggle and reboot your system. Maybe destroy a little data if you were stupid enough not to install any medicine. Therefore, the Metaverse is wide open and undefended, like airports in the days before bombs and metal detectors, like elementary schools in the days before maniacs with assault rifles. Anyone can go in and do anything that they want to."
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, 1992.