1981 Philip Dick SF novel describes Kindle-ish gizmo for students: Some TeleRead parallels, too?
Since the early 1990s I’ve been calling for well-stocked national digital library systems with integration with local libraries and schools—and ways to encourage the spread of e-friendly hardware.
But I’m hardly the first to think about the glories of e-book for learning.
Over at the Print Is Dead blog, Jeff Gomez writes about Philip K. Dick’s The Divine Invasion—published in 1981:
"At one point in The Divine Invasion, a character named Emmanuel (who is actually God in the body of a child) is given an electronic device at his school. Called an ‘information slate,’ the gadget sounds an awful lot like either an eBook device or a Tablet PC. Made by I.B.M. (which, in the future, is part of the government), Dick describes each slate as having a ‘pale gray surface’ and containing ‘common microcircuitry’ (which makes it sort of seem like a Kindle). Each student is given one, and each device is ‘plugged into the school’ (which sounds a lot like either an intranet if not the Internet). Plus, the fact that every child gets one reminded me of this story from last week in The New York Times about how colleges are handing out iPods to freshman. The slates quiz the students, answering questions and giving out information.
"In the early ‘80s—at the dawn of the computer revolution—his could have easily been imagined. The slates Dick describes sound a bit like an expansion of any number of gizmos that existed back then, even my beloved Dataman that I had in elementary school. The big difference is that none of those devices were networked with other devices (the closest I came to that was my Coleco Head-to-Head Football)… "
Nostalgia: Actually I can recall briefly writing up the Sony Dataman for a laptop magazine in the ’80s or ’90s. Its LCD display suffered a problem shared with E Ink displays today, as I see it—contrast challenges. But it could read CD-ROMs and was useful for specialized apps, such as use on oil platforms, where paper technical documentation might not be handy.
Housekeeping: I’m using quote marks rather than blockquotes because WordPress often has trouble handling the mix of blocks and graphics.
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