Sci-Fi Author Made Spookily Accurate Modern Smartphone Predictions in 1999

There are no two ways about it, 1999 was a vastly different time. There were no driverless cars, A.I. or augmented reality. And, notably, it was a full eight years before the first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs on a stage in San Francisco.

Few of us back then could have guessed where technology would eventually end up. That is, with one possible exception.

That exception is sci-fi author David Gerrold, who wrote several award-winning novels as well as the beloved Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” But he wrote other things, too — including a spookily accurate prediction of modern smartphones nearly a decade before they hit the market.

That prediction came in the form of a 1999 column in Sm@rt Reseller, a tech magazine. Esther Schindler, who was the publication’s tech editor at the time, posted a picture of the column on Twitter Wednesday.

At the time, Schindler had asked Gerrold to predict the future of computing, and in return, Gerrold offered the following forecast.

“I’ve got a cell phone, a pocket organizer, a beeper, a calculator, a pocket tape recorder, a music player, and somewhere around here, I used to have a color television,” Gerrold wrote. “Sometime in the next few years, all of those devices are going to meld into one.”

Remember, this was way before the invention of the smartphone. One of the most popular cell phones of the day looked like this. But Gerrold didn’t stop there.

“It will be a box less than an inch thick and smaller than a deck of cards,” he wrote. “The size will be determined by what’s convenient to hold, not by the technology inside.”

In the column, the sci-fi writer went on to explain that it’ll sport a high-res color display, a microphone, a headphone jack, a camera lens, wireless connectivity, and television and beeper functions. He added that it, presumably, would be able to “handle e-mail.”

He added that the theoretical device would have enough “processing power and memory to function as a desktop system,” and might be able to dock with a keyboard and full-size monitor.

Most interestingly, Gerrold said that the palm-sized computer would have both speech recognition and speech synthesis capabilities — “It will be an agent, going out and doing cyber-errand” for its users. And he said it would be able to translate language in real-time. Sound familiar?

Frighteningly, the author also said make another eerie prediction: “… having all that connectivity is going to destroy what’s left of everyone’s privacy.”

Of course, Gerrold did not foresee the killing of the headphone jack. And it’s arguable whether smartphones are really still designed to be “convenient to hold.” But still, the rest of it is startlingly accurate — and it makes us wonder what predictions Gerrold has about the future of tech now.