Hi phil

Murray Leinster (aka Will Jenkins) accurately described both personal computers and something like the Net in his 1946 story "A Logic Named Joe" - the basic plot of which was repeated in a late 70s story, I discovered - and the sheer dependence of business on the Net, like telephones and teletypers before it. He was understandably vague on the details of the circuitry, but the basics are all in that story, which I have in an original 1946 "Astounding" - sadly a bit decrepit.

That story was also an AI story, and the AI was achieved via "boot-strapping", akin to the Net 'self-awareness' some are speculating about know.

But the 1940s were usually right-off the mark. I've a copy of Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" (the 1940 version; he revised it in 1949) which is about the first reactor c. 1965 - but one driven by a neutron beam, and on the verge of exploding. Power is collected via PV converters, and the mass of uranium is 2 tons, which has depleted the uranium mines of the day.

At the same time fictionally is the story "The Roads Must Roll" (1940) which replaces cars with rolling conveyer belts. The story is some time after a big Strike in 1960. Heinlein pushed the dates forward to "the Strike of '66" in 1949 and then "'76" in a 1958 anthology.

Interestingly he and Arthur Clarke both predicted the first Moon Landing by 1978, at the latest. "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and "Prelude to Space" were both written in 1949 and both predict the same year. One uses a big chemical step rocket, the other uses a two-stage nuke-hybrid. Both also predicted extensive expansion into the Solar System in the wake of that landing.

Clarke's "The Sands of Mars" was set twenty years after Martin Gibson, the protagonist, writes his first best seller (c. 1972/73) - and has a 4,000 person colony on Mars by 1992, with expeditions to Saturn c. 1990.

His first version of "Earthlight" (his only space-war novel) is set in 2015, forty years after the first landing on the Moon. Venus is extensively colonised, and declares independence by 2000. Mars and the outer planets aren't far behind, but Earth has a strangle-hold on the outer planets by its control of uranium supplies. Thus the war.

The novel version is set in c.2175, so the setting has changed - nuclear fusion is used, Mars is terraformed, and so on.

So the last 30 years should've been a lot busier around the Solar System than they actually were. The biggest impediment to space expansion has been that none of the promised destinations were as nice as advertised - the Moon was much drier, Venus much hotter, Mars more out-of-breath, empty space full of Van Allen Belts, solar Mass Ejection Events and cosmic rays.

Also Space stations didn't need dozens of personnel to replace vacuum tubes, rockets didn't have to be reuseable, and so on...

Adam