Cell phones were in wide use in 1999 but they were very different devices than what we have now. The first modern smartphone, the Apple iPhone, was almost a decade away. At that time, I had a cell phone (I think it was a Nokia), a cassette recorder/FM Radio, and a portable CD player that also played MP3s. I didn't yet have a digital camera.
So it's remarkable that SF author David Gerrold was able to make an accurate prediction about the future of phones and digital technology in general.
Not only did he get that the phone would become our single digital device, merging a phone, camera, digital recorder, music player, beeper, television, and more. He got the second-order effects right too.
He went on to predict how it would connect wirelessly and "function as a desktop system", as well as connect to full-sized screens and have speech recognition, act as a translator, and be used for emails.
For good measure, he predicted that it would also be used to book hotels.
Like all good sci-fi writers, he not only managed to predict the tech, but also the massive downsides that would come with it – mainly how annoying it would become.
"I call this device a Personal Information Telecommunications Agent, or Pita for short," he wrote. "The acronym also can stand for Pain in the Ass, which it is equally likely to be, because having all that connectivity is going to destroy what’s left of everyone’s privacy.”
There's a widely-shared view that science fiction has predicted much of modern science and technology, but when you start digging into what was actually said, you'll find that's not really true, with a few notable exceptions. This is definitely one of them.
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