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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 @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).

@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.