These days, just about everyone carries around a “Personal Information Telecommunications Agent.”
Which also happens to be an acronym for something that can’t be written in a family-friendly newspaper.
It’s the name science fiction writer David Gerrold in the late 1990s applied to his prediction for the device he saw coming — what we call the smartphone — that would combine into one the myriad of devices people used to carry around.
Gerrold’s writing credits include the much-loved episode of the original Star Trek series, ” The Trouble with Tribbles .”
On Twitter, technology writer Esther Schindler said that in 1999, she had asked Gerrold to write a “future of computing” prediction for a magazine where she was the technology editor at the time.
Gerrold’s prediction turned out to be very, very accurate — as he foresaw cell phones, pocket organizers, beepers, calculators, digital cameras, pocket tape recorders, music players, and even televisions melding into one device.
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