Arthur C. Clarke, author of "2001: A Space Odyssey," invented the communications satellite.
Clarke, a science fiction author and tech visionary who essentially invented the communications satellite, foresaw how a future in which there would be widespread use of distributed computer terminals, if not computers of one's very own, would be a game-changer for society.
Prescience is not the measure of a science-fiction author's success — we don't value the work of H. G. Wells because he foresaw the atomic bomb or Arthur C. Clarke for inventing the communications satellite — but it is worth pausing, on the occasion of Ray Bradbury's death, to notice how uncannily accurate was his vision of the numb, cruel future we now inhabit.
This is a compelling fact because although the top AT&T executives and attorneys involved with Project Greenstar were sworn to secrecy concerning this surveillance project, they were working alongside these other agencies inventing modern communications.
Sir Arthur, who also invented the idea of communications satellites, took pride in getting the physics right.
The technologies of instant communications have invented another kind of accident: the extermination of space and the derealization of time.
Twitter was invented three years after the Communications Act, under which Chambers was prosecuted, came into force.
Kivi Sotamaa, a young architect from Helsinki who was visiting Paris on New Year's Eve, said, "The airplane is the greatest communications hardware ever invented".
It is simply shocking that America, the country that invented modern advertising and marketing communications, has put together such a bewilderingly uncreative and counterproductive sales pitch.
"WHO would have thought that the distorted screams of two modems introducing themselves would come to symbolise the dawn of the greatest communications medium ever invented?" muses Sky Dayton, who founded EarthLink, an internet-access provider, in 1994.
They supported the education of cadres of science and engineering students who subsequently invented personal computers, software, wireless communications and the Internet.
