Word: gadget
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...chemist, the greatest inventor. He had Polaroid, television and the shotgun mike at least a decade before the public did, and if you don't watch out, he'll "teleport" you atom by atom to his mysterious laboratory near the North Pole. Like James Bond, Doc is gadget-gaga. Dozens of tiny martial devices-gas bombs, sedative darts, ultraviolet flashlights-are concealed in his clothing. His cars are rolling fire bases that can "go like Barney Oldfield" and crash like tanks through concrete walls. The transports and fighter planes in his private air force are really "whizzers...
What he yearns for is a therapeutic attachment for his gadget so that he can cure as well as diagnose. Before long, he is in the hands of an ultramodern devil named Art Immelmann, who claims to be the liaison man for the somehow still-functioning Rockefeller-Ford-Carnegie foundations. Art explains that all three are anxious to fund lapsometer research in return for patent rights. Dr. More signs them over, and in no time at all the device is being used to foment further disorder. As a satire the book has something to offend just about everyone. Conservative Catholics...
...that, IBM filed a lawsuit against Memorex, a large peripheral maker, alleging use of IBM trade secrets. The company also brought out a model of its new System/370 that can be equipped with its own disk drive, making it difficult for a user to add a competitor's gadget. The independents have retaliated with price cuts of their own, and more are expected...
Rock Festival. This time the EVA (ExtraVehicular Activity) will include some fireworks-real ones. Earlier lunar seismic experiments have been largely passive; that is, the seismometers have usually depended on the occurrence of moonquakes or other natural rumblings to make readings. Now, with the help of a new gadget called a "thumper," which resembles a heavily weighted walking stick, Mitchell will create some miniature moonquakes of his own. As he walks past three widely spaced seismic listening devices called geophones, he will place the thumper on the surface and detonate one of 21 explosive charges in its base plate...
Dial-a-Buclc. The most popular new gadget is the "television teller." As installed in Los Angeles' Surety National Bank, among others, it seems straight out of 1984. Customers enter the lobby and go up to television screens that show only the faces of tellers, who are safely locked away on the second floor. All transactions are conducted through an intercom and pneumatic tubes. One unit with tube attachments costs from $11,000 to $23,000. Pittsburgh's Mellon Bank is installing an expensive computer-controlled alarm network that connects all its branches with the central office...