why I like old science fiction

[mmcirvin]

From Arthur C. Clarke's Earthlight (1955), in an astronomical observatory on the Moon, 22nd century:

Jamieson was still wiping developer from his hands when he arrived. After more than three hundred years, certain aspects of photography were quite unchanged. Wheeler, who thought everything could be done by electronics, regarded many of his older friend's activities as survival from the age of alchemy.

"Well?" said Jamieson, wasting no words.

Wheeler pointed to the punched tape lying on the desk.

"I was doing the routine check of the magnitude integrator. It's found something."

"It's always doing that," snorted Jamieson. "Every time anyone sneezes in the Observatory, it thinks it's discovered a new planet."

He does have a telescope with a TV camera later on... I'll forgive him for not guessing that you could electronically integrate a whole image over a long exposure.

Later on, there's a guess that Clarke gets right, albeit with unambitious historical timing:

"The mounting looks odd to me," Sadler remarked thoughtfully. "It's more like that of a gun than any telescope I've ever seen."

"Quite correct. They didn't bother about an equatorial mounting. There's an automatic computer that keeps it tracking any star we set it on."[...]

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

the cool thing about this is that the "punched tape" sentence does not mention computers in any way... so, if you were a 12-year-old casual science fiction fan today, reading this book, you would think punched tape was some exotic futuristic concept, but you'd be enfuriated because Clarke doesn't describe what it's supposed to do.

you would also probably imagine some kind of magnetic tape (tape cassette) with hole punches in it.

Talysman the Ur-Beatle