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Inventors Who Got Their Ideas from Sci-Fi
American inventor Simon Lake was captivated by the idea of travel after reading Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” in 1870. He built the Argonaut, the first submarine to operate successfully in the open ocean, in 1898. Verne congratulated him.
Igor Sikorsky invented the modern helicopter, inspired by Jules Verne’s “Clipper of the Clouds.” He quoted Verne: “Anything that one man can imagine, another man can make real.”
Robert H. Goddard built the first successful liquid-fueled rocket in 1926, inspired by an 1898 newspaper serialization of H.G. Wells’ classic novel about a Martian invasion, “War of the Worlds.”
In 1914, H.G. Wells’ novel “The World Set Free” inspired physicist Leo Szilard in 1933 to solve the problem of creating a nuclear chain reaction — in 1933.
E.E. “Doc” Smith delighted readers with his “Lensmen” novels, about a futuristic Galactic Patrol. In 1947, sci-fi editor James W. Campbell wrote Smith to say that the Directrix command ship featured in his series had inspired a U.S. naval officer to introduce the concept of combat information centers aboard warships.
Robert Heinlein in 1942 wrote a short story about a physically infirm inventor, Waldo F. Jones, who created a remotely operated mechanical hand. Real-life “waldos” were developed for the nuclear industry a few years later.
Martin Cooper, the director of development at Motorola, credited the Star Trek communicator for the design of the first mobile phone in the early 1970s. “That was not fantasy to us. That was an objective.”
The early 20th century character Tom Swift, a genius inventor, inspired NASA physicist Jack Cover’s invention of the Taser, an acronym for Swift’s “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle.”
Apple scientist Steve Perlman got his idea for the groundbreaking multimedia program QuickTime after watching an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” where one character listens to multiple music tracks on his computer.
Philip Rosedale, inventor of the online community Second Life, credits Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” for painting “a compelling picture of what such a virtual world could look like in the near future, and I found that inspiring.”
Bill Gates credits a “Stargate SG-1” episode, “2010,” with the idea of creating a vaccine to dramatically reduce Earth’s population to reverse the threat of global climate change. “We only need some way to convince people to take it.”
Excuse me, what’s that? Oh, of course. Bill just called to correct the record. He has never watched “Stargate SG-1.” (He also muttered something about, “Let them eat insects.”)
Published in Humor
FreeHand and PageMaker ruled like San Dimas High School football!
I am SO old right now. I was a master of those programs once upon a time…
Aldus PageMaker remains to DTP what WordStar remains to word processing. The best ever, and I wish we had them now.
Instead we have MS Word, which tries to do both and fails at each. But it wins the money fight.
AKA F-35.
I made a living using them for about four years.
It sure was a lot easier to use than Quark notsoXpress.
(Speaking of Aldus products, the Wiki page for PageMaker contains this entirely incorrect statement:
“(Freehand, Aldus’s competitor to Adobe Illustrator, was sold to Altsys, the maker of Fontographer.)”
Freehand was returned to Altsys, as the original author under order by a Federal judge to allow Adobe’s purchase of Aldus, as Adobe owning both Freehand and Illustrator was considered anti-competitive.
Sheesh.
You could offer that correction to them, but unless you have published documents somewhere, they likely won’t accept it. I get that they want to curb a lot of “unsourced” material, maybe especially those who constantly edit articles to claim that islam created everything, but it also means they miss out on a lot of good true history and stuff, that was never published in books that you can still find anywhere.
It’s on the Freehand page, for crying out loud.
But I’m done editing or getting involved in any discussion on the Wikipedia site after some really nasty flaming there about fifteen years ago.
If you brought it to their attention, and the Freehand page doesn’t reference published (on paper, apparently) material, they might just as easily alter the Freehand page to match the Pagemaker page.
I used to make annual donations, but I can’t put up with that kind of nonsense.
Yeah, neither do I. Which is why I’ll merely point it out here. Getting involved there is jumping directly into a cesspool.
It can be a valuable resource, but it’s far too difficult to contribute, a lot of unpaid work and likely impossible in many cases. They probably couldn’t find a better source than me for information on Qantel computer systems, but none of the user manuals etc were publicly available, so as far as they’re concerned I might as well have imagined it all.
They make it deliberately difficult to contribute, so a select few people with too much time on their hands can control the content and the discussions. Which is exactly what Wikipedia was supposed to not become.
Indeed. They have had problems from time to time with various islamic activists screwing things up – I used to read about them occasionally on imdb message boards back when they had them – but there might be other reasons too why they’ve gotten so obstreperous.
Some time ago, I had just seen the Josie And The Pussycats movie, and realized that the wikipedia article on it had a mistake. So I corrected the mistake, and for my “source” or “reason” or whatever, I put something like “just saw the movie.” Maybe two days later, my correction was “reverted” back to the original mistake. So, screw them.
Wait: You mean someone on the Internet is wrong?!
My favorite was WordPerfect 3.1 . . .
If I need a keyboard template to know how to use it, then pass.
Not familiar. I loved WP5.1 and WS 3.x (3,4 I think)
I knew the commands so well, I “didn’t need no stinkin’ template” . . .
I liked the WP 5.0 series too. I also loved PlanPerfect over Excel . . .
Go TECO or go home.
Oh please, not TECO…
Character-based text editing. You read that right. Character-based.
One amusing thing you could do with TECO was type in your own name and see what commands got executed.
You’ve heard of WYSIWYG?
TECO was WYGIAG. (What You Get Is Anybody’s Guess.)
In the early 80s I used the IBM Personal Editor program for DOS, it was pretty cool. It was much better for writing/editing programs than other programs. For one thing, it had “rectangular block” editing functions not just text/line/wrap.
For example, in text like this:
AAAAABBBBBCCCCCDDDDD
AAAAABBBBBCCCCCDDDDD
AAAAABBBBBCCCCCDDDDD
AAAAABBBBBCCCCCDDDDD
You could “mark” the first B in the first line, and the last B in the last line, and move them all to the ends of the lines, in one operation. So you’d end up with:
AAAAACCCCCDDDDDBBBBB
AAAAACCCCCDDDDDBBBBB
AAAAACCCCCDDDDDBBBBB
AAAAACCCCCDDDDDBBBBB
That is VERY handy when you’re packing and unpacking file records, etc.
Also, the entire keyboard was programmable. By editing a definitions/macros file, you could create whatever specialized commands you frequently used, and they could consist of multiple “keystrokes.”
I believe it could run on a 16k byte PC with a single floppy disk drive.
I have a copy in my collection, in the original box with manual…
All your better text editors can still do that. Hold down the ALT key while making the selection with your mouse.
Those were the days before the mouse. (AM for Ante Mouse? PM being Post Mouse.) The other editors only seemed to do word/line-wrap “block” operations.
Notepad++. Get the cursor where you want to start, then hold down SHIFT and ALT while using the arrow keys.
It was only a text cursor in those days. Just DOS.
Sheesh!
All you young kids are making me feel old. The first programs I wrote in for real job were with an ASR-33 using paper tape and a mechanical reader. The editor was a Xacto knife and scotch tape (and a steady hand). High speed input was an optical reader.
After that was punched cards and lots of racks to hold the deck in compression so the cards wouldn’t warp. The first control system I did with a display had a character set that I programmed myself – bit by bit.
After that, it was all downhill.
That was High School for me. College was punch-cards.
That’s how the PDP-12 did it.
That’s an OSCILLOSCOPE, not a text display. All the “text” is DRAWN. Point by point.
MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
I’m pretty sure both vi and EMACS could do it on UNIX years before DOS.
But I get your point.