iPads (1968)
There were many future predictions made in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. But there’s one that the movie got entirely right. It’s not the lunar colonies or zero-gravity stewardesses, but rather the tablets used by astronauts that look almost identical to today’s iPads.
As the movie’s co-writer Arthur C. Clarke described them, these devices were called “newspads” and could be plugged “into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth.
The postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and [the astronaut] could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flashback to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.”
