iPads (1968)
Of all the future predictions made in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, there’s one that the movie got entirely right. It’s not the lunar colonies or zero-gravity stewardesses, but rather the tablet used by astronauts that looks almost identical to today’s iPads.
As author Arthur C. Clarke described it in the 1968 novel of the same name, these devices were called “newspads” and could be plugged “into the ship’s information circuit (to) scan the latest reports from Earth. The postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen. When (an astronaut) had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.” Unfortunately, neither Kubrick nor Clarke lived to see the iPad get released in 2010.
