I read Robert Heinlein's "I Will Fear No Evil". The book takes place in 2015. In one of the chapters there were characters who were looking for a freshly dead body and one of the characters suggested they could search computerized medical databases because "computers were growing increasingly interconnected".
I found that funny, I was reading that book close to 2015 and I thought, "we already have the Internet". Then I realized the book was published in 1970, before even the personal computer revolution. So then I realized the incredible foresight Heinlein must have had to anticipate that people would network computers.
In the "I Will Fear No Evil" universe computers are connected together in a slowly growing ad-hoc network. I think this was a reasonable prediction, most progress happens slowly and incrementally. "Revolutionary" change that happens quickly is the exception, rather than the rule.
I found that funny, I was reading that book close to 2015 and I thought, "we already have the Internet". Then I realized the book was published in 1970, before even the personal computer revolution. So then I realized the incredible foresight Heinlein must have had to anticipate that people would network computers.
In the "I Will Fear No Evil" universe computers are connected together in a slowly growing ad-hoc network. I think this was a reasonable prediction, most progress happens slowly and incrementally. "Revolutionary" change that happens quickly is the exception, rather than the rule.