Missed It By That Much

Warning: this is a variant of the 'great science fiction 
predictions' thread, which I don't think has been around these parts 
for a couple months at least.  

	On a recent re-read of Arthur C Clarke's _Imperial Earth_ I 
noticed that Clarke got (characteristically [1]) very correct that in 
The Future we would all have abundant access to phones with multiple modes

of contact, and personal computers with enough storage that their data 
banks become full of stuff in the 'Miscellaneous' folder, and that to 
be out of theoretical instant contact with the bulk of humanity would 
feel almost supernatural.  All told, a mighty good prediction for life 
in 2006, even if he was nominally aiming for 2276.  

	The one oversight: people in his future still have phone numbers, 
long and superficially random strings of digits needed to contact them.  
(Worse, they have different numbers for different communication modes.)  
You can in his world easily look up people and get the number, and from 
the number get to the person, but he seems to have overlooked that the 
internal need for phone numbers would be tucked into the interior 
databases and people would just look for names, possibly addresses, 
instead. 

	So I'm curious in other predictions that are almost dead-on, but 
that miss just a tiny bit in how things did turn out.  


	[1] If there's one characteristic I'd say is common to Clarke 
worlds, it's the recognition that 'information deficiency' -- including 
in that communication and entertainment -- is almost as bad for humans 
as nutritional deficiency is.  This might be informed by his moving from 
London to a far outpost of Empire.  

-- 
								Joseph Nebus
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