In 1974, fifty-one years ago, this brief interview with science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke (most famous for 2001: A Space Odyssey, published in 1968) describes a day when computers will be a vital part of our lives. He says to imagine a day when a computer would fit on a desk. Imagine if he saw your phone today. He would have thought it to be science fiction!
Note the room in the background. It is a computer room. It was a computer room like this where I first played with programming and taught a computer to play “golf” using BASIC computer language back in my high school years.
Four hundred keypunched cards it took
all those misty years ago
to get ol’ IBM to cook
and play a game of tic-tac-toe.
Fortran was the lingo then
(I never liked Pascal),
and notebooks writ in coloured pen
held code and comment, one and all.
Jump ahead ’bout thirteen years,
Fortran, still, and four-eight-six
worked to banish seismic fears
by using finite element tricks
to let a bridge bend but withstand
the trident in Poseidon’s hand.
Incredible how prescient Clarke was. After 30 years in high tech—with companies like Intel, Xerox, and Infosys—I’ve seen his vision not just fulfilled but exceeded. What once filled a room now fits in our pockets. The pace of change has been breathtaking, and its impact on how we live and work is nothing short of revolutionary. Your memory of programming in BASIC brings it full circle—we’re truly living in the world Clarke imagined.
That guy’s dreams for the future were unbelievably accurate. Can you imagine how many people laughed at him back then? “Talk to a computer? You’re nuts. None of that will ever happen.”
I wonder if he got to see it become reality (the other guy, not Clarke).
I just want to point out that Arthur C. Clark was, above all else, a writer.
This was fun because I saw the age of the computer on desktops starting in my teens and taking off in the 90’s along with the first wave of the world wide web. As soon as I knew about 80% of the tech for my networking job, something changed and I was suddenly needing training because I knew how to only handle 50% of the tech if lucky.
I’m also laughing at Andrew’s poem because for my computer science degree in the late 80’s I had to learn Pascal, COBOL and BASIC. I didn’t get to learn Fortran and the comp sci department was moved from math/science to business while I was there or I would have dual degrees for comp sci and systems management.
And I had fun showing a group of teens in our church’s academy how creativity got us from Star Trek sci-fi to reality for automatic doors, tablets, Bluetooth, smartphones. and as noted in this post and other comments, talking to our computers or to my FireTV.
We programmed games in Basic then walked about a mile across campus to THE computer building where we handed over a stack of punch cards. 8 hours or the next day I walked back to pick up the long, attached sheets of paper (which we turned into banners) and line edited. Then repeat until game works. What a hoot.
My grandfather told my mom, “one day you will see moving pictures as well as sound”. As a kid I dreamed of talking face to face through a screen like the Jetsons, and having a hand held communicator and computer like on Star Trek. Isn’t the human mind for invention amazing?
I had my first FORTRAN class back in 1980, missed punchcards by one semester. I never appreciated LISP and functional programming until later in life. It’s such an intuitive way to think and code; it’s homoiconic where data is code and code is data. Probably the reason I love coding in Mathematica.
I get a kick out watching old interviews like this. I would note however that Clarke’s accurate predictions get cherry-picked from a series of other predictions.
Back in ’62, he wrote a book called Profiles of the Future, which I probably read back in the early 70s. In various interviews and non-fiction work, he also predicted the end of cities, the end of war, permanent moon bases by now, manned missions to planets by now, clean unlimited energy, undersea cities, and automation bringing general prosperity so we can pursue more aesthetic things.