By 1966 or 1967, when I began reading Isaac Asimov novels, a version of that mainframe had recently become available for use in a few high-school computing classes, so that some of us in the Palo Alto school system were taught how to inscribe the punch-cards that fed into the mechanical maw-a process so inhuman and alienating and difficult, so resolutely digital in its outlook, that I was determined never to have anything to do with computers again. In 1955, the year my family moved to Palo Alto, my father had just started working for IBM, where he helped develop the huge mainframe computer that would eventually become the great-great-great-grandfather of Macs and PCs alike. What is remarkable is that Asimov’s book first appeared in print in 1955.įor those of you who were not around then (and I barely was-I was three at the time), let me assure you that none of the present-day realities mentioned in my first paragraph was even a mote in a scientist’s eye. The above description, detail by detail, exactly characterizes the world of Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity, a science-fiction novel set mainly in the 482nd, 575th, and 2456th centuries.
We do, in fact, live in such a world, but I mean something else. The world we inhabit is one in which weekly newsmagazines, printed on paper in columns of type, are considered primitive and profoundly obsolescent in which an entire bookshelf of bound volumes can be stored in a gadget the size of a fingertip in which a mechanical device that is only about four inches long and a fraction of an inch thick can record whatever we like, play it back to us through a tiny earpiece, and rest comfortably in a pocket when not in use in which space flight has been invented but is rarely used by humans, who have lost interest in it after the initial decades of excitement in which hand-held or easily portable computers are a commonplace item in which literature can hardly be distinguished from film in the public mind and in which some members of society long fruitlessly for a past era when all such developments were unknown and almost inconceivable.
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