Maia

There's not even a hint of anything like it in any of the classic SF stories I've read, Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, etc. They are acclaimed as great visionaries, but none of what they predicted has really come true. We don't have robots as household servants, we don't have colonies on the moon or Mars, or in orbiting cities, or vast human cloning programmes, rocket ships, or a world government, yet theoretically all these things are well within our technology and abilities. We have just chosen not to have them.

Pedro

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. 1909. A very good hint indeed.

Maia

Not familiar with it I'm afraid. Does it have something like the internet in it?

Davidius

I don't think that the SF writers of the past were actually predicting these things, just presenting the ideas as entertaining stories. Also, it is hard to conceive of radical advances to the newest technology of the age. I just finished reading a SF story from the early sixties where the spaceships computer was operated by punchcards! At the time this was cutting edge technology so we should forgive them for not looking too far ahead.
Mind you, some authors don't bother looking for future developments at all. In Isaac Asimov's Foundation books the characters all talk and act like people from 1950's America, despite the books being set so far in the future that the home planet of humanity has been forgotten. Don't get me started on Asimov though, waaaaay overated IMO.

Pedro

OH yes indeed. From Wiki:
Forester describes it as a plate. That has always made me think of a platter. But a plate could be rectangular. Also... what else is the Internet except a machine that allows individuals to live in isolation.

Maia

Maybe they've been acclaimed too much as prophets of the future when in fact they were just telling stories.

I found the Foundation books, especially the early ones, very depressing for some reason. The ones he wrote much later on weren't so bad though.

Maia

That is pretty prophetic, yes. Also, now I think about it, Asimov had a planet called Solaria where everyone comminicated by video screens and hardly ever met.

Pedro

1909? We can push the time back to 1898 to Mark Twain. (Who else?!!) Twain wrote a story called ‘From the ‘London Times’ of 1904’. In the story he dreams up the telelectroscope which was a combination of the ‘new fangled’ telephone and some sort of scope. The story describes “the daily doing of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by an number of leagues.”
Sound to me like he is not only inventing the Internet but the twits that overload it with the trivial trash.

Here is an excerpt that ought to tickle you:
"Day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people. ... He seldom spoke, and I never interrupted him when he was absorbed in this amusement."
Does that ring a bell??

The plot of the story concerns a man falsely accused of murder and sentenced to death. He escapes this fate by logging on to his telelectroscope and finds the supposed victim in a crowd being streamed live from China.

The story is not up to Twains usual standards but his thinking still gives us that wonderful gee wiz moment.

Maia

Interesting that it's by someone not usually noted as an SF writer.

Pedro

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (1961?) had this:

"They went to the living room; Jill sat at his feet and they applied themselves to martinis. Opposite his chair was a stereovision tank disguised as an aquarium; he switched it on, guppies and tetras gave way to the face of the well-known Winchell Augustus Greaves."

Although it isn’t about the internet it is about a screen saver and personal computer, some 10 years early. Was Heinlein the first to mention screen savers?

It would really be mind blowing if he had included flying toasters. (Am I showing my age with that?)