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@ZySoua Lem was really thoughtful about future advances in information technology and got a lot of things spot on. His writings about AI in "Imaginary Magnitude" and "A Perfect Vacuum" feel more like what we actually got than most science-fiction treatments do (he even had the idea of machine translation systems producing pastiche texts as a byproduct).
@mattmcirvin @ZySoua As usual, this is an example of something being mistakenly interpreted as anticipating a "future" technology because the "future" person has forgotten the technology it was actually based on.
In the mid-20th century, libraries were transferring deteriorating newspapers and such to microfiche/microfilm. Microfiche/microfilm readers became commonplace fixtures in libraries for some decades. There were also some portable readers but these never caught on.
@isaackuo @ZySoua I used those a lot back in the day-- many libraries still have old periodical collections on microfilm. When we were touring colleges for my daughter, at one point we were at a university library (Concordia in Montreal, I think) and I started rummaging in the microfilm drawers--she acted like I was disturbing a mysterious historical artifact and I explained that I was well familiar with these, it was just the old magazine collection. I think Asimov described far future galactic libraries on microfilm in the Foundation books.
@isaackuo @mattmcirvin @ZySoua Microfiche only stored IMAGES of the text though, not the text. That's an important distinction.
@negative12dollarbill @mattmcirvin @ZySoua Is it a relevant distinction, though? The "opton" device described by Stanislaw Lem in Return from the Stars seems to be a futuristic improvement over microfilm (which the protagonist from the past is familiar with).
@negative12dollarbill @mattmcirvin @ZySoua I am, however, VERY curious where the idea of storing large amounts of information on crystals came from. 1961 is way too early for optical holography, but ...
Digging a bit, I see electron holography was used to record electron holograms to zinc oxide crystals in 1952, with 1nm resolution (two orders of magnitude better than today's UV photolithography).
And that's just the first crystal based recording technology of the period I found...
@negative12dollarbill @mattmcirvin @ZySoua So, using the latest futuristic 1950s technology, I could imagine an Opton being made out of a combination of an Aikens tube flat display and an electron hologram crystal. Instead of deflecting an electron beam with electromagnets, the electron beam is diffracted off the hologram crystal.
A worm screw mechanism incrementally rotates and advances the crystal for you to scroll from page to page.
@isaackuo @mattmcirvin @ZySoua
Images of text aren't searchable, copy-and-paste-able, editable, linkable, you can't render them in different sizes or fonts etc.
I remember the microfiche I used as being very well indexed sometimes, but even then, the index was just an image of text in itself.
@negative12dollarbill @mattmcirvin @ZySoua Okay, but so what? The Opton isn't described as having those capabilities.
However, the "Lecton" is described as being able to be set to any voice, tempo, or modulation. This is clearly more fancy that direct audio playback, perhaps alluding to adjustable playback speed and band filters to modify modulation and voice characteristics.
@isaackuo @mattmcirvin @ZySoua
I agree the description is ambiguous, and I agree the effect of reading it was somewhat similar to reading microfiche.
@negative12dollarbill @isaackuo @ZySoua the microfiche WAS the index at the county Central Library when I was in high school. The card catalog was on it. I loved using that thing-- felt really futuristic at the time, scrolling over the 2D landscape of micro-text.