Much as the BBC series did, Hyperland struck me initially as a Pythonesque romp through the frontiers at the time of interactive media. No surprise, given that the author, Douglas Adams, wrote for Monty Python’s flying circus (which was my first surprise). As I watched, what captured my interest the most was that degree to which the ideas on the frontiers of interactive communication, and the supporting platforms, had advanced in not that many years, but a portion of my lifetime.
It reminded me of a talk my Dad and I had, a year or so before he died; I was probably twenty. We often visited – in retrospect not enough – and when we did, about many things. This day we talked about what had come to pass in his lifetime, specifically about how technology had so remarkably advanced, and that much of what was taken for granted did not exist when he was born in 1898 – no cars, nor airplanes, no NASA, and in the realm of communications, no radio, no television.
(A little context would probably help here: I was the product of a second marriage; Dad started his second family when he was well into his fifties.)
Dad enjoyed reading Dick Tracy, a comic strip about a detective that Chester Gould penned from the early thirties well into the seventies. The Two-Way Wrist Radio arrived on the scene in January 1946, and was later upgraded to a Two-Way Wrist TV in the early sixties. Dad was certain that someday the fantasy wrist radio would become a reality. In fact it did, inspiring Martin Cooper’s invention of the cell phone, and arguably was the predecessor of later smartwatches; the Apple Watch comes to mind.
In my lifetime has come The Hitchhiker’s Guide, and from it, perhaps, technology. Inspired by a stolen copy of Ken Welsh’s Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe, it became, as Suze Kundu describes in Forbes, “…the go-to reference material for any universal traveller…described in [H2G2] as being ‘a small, thin, flexible lap computer,’” from which, “with the tap of a few buttons, information on any topic appears on the screen.”
Not much different from what I’m using to write this.