I was explaining to my 10 year old about The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy last night and it struck me that it was essentially a tablet pc… a guide to all knowledge in the universe in a small interactive package.
Obviously it had a cooler cover though.

How far ahead of his time was Douglas Adams?

Interesting tell me more…

What’s the point. No one would listen.
I’ve got this really terrible pain in my diodes down my left side.
Not that anyone’s interested.

Now there was a man who knew where his towel was.

Cup of tea?

How far ahead of his time was Douglas Adams?

Ethernet, Babelfish to name a couple of things named after his ideas. He was more insightful than Arthur C Clarke IMO! certainly more humorous!

Am liking the picture of the book on the kindle sort of sums it up.

Must go back and read the book, its been a good few years – probably why I didn’t remember it was a rod.

So long (& thanks for all the fish)

The Kindle is, basically, the Guide. I said much the same when I bought one for my OH last year.

Would you like to hear some poetry?

Depends. Are you Paula Nancy Milstone Jennings of Suffolk?

HHGTTG has the funniest joke of all time in it.

(Arthur and Ford find themselves about to be ejected into space and to almost certain death)

Arthur Dent: You know, it’s at times like this, when I’m stuck in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.
Ford Prefect: Why? What did she tell you?
Arthur Dent: I don’t know! I didn’t listen!

I watched the recent film up to this point and they didn’t include this joke so I turned it off.

Encyclopaedia Galactica came first but ‘it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.’

I tried to explain about taking a towel with you wherever you go as well but then both sons just looked at me as though I was mad & my misses told me they weren’t ready for it yet.

What price education? Who could ask for more than H2G2

The Shoe Event Horizon.

That’s all.

Not sure if he had more ideas than AC Clarke, but much funnier.
‘I feel like a military Academy, bits of me keep passing out’
(I’m sure that’s not word perfect, but you get the idea.)

Artheur Dent : What’s wrong with being drunk?

Ford Prefect : Ask a glass of water.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.
The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Mr Woppit
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.
The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Quite possibly my favourite part. I have honestly lost track of the number of times I have read the books or listened to the radio shows. IMHO the best piece of written work ever written.

It’s the little throwaway lines and turns of phrase that kill me. “The ships hung in the air, in much the same way that bricks don’t.”

I agree, profound too:

He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Yes. This.

My sense of humour is a little… different. I can watch a film that leaves me cold but has everyone else rolling in the aisles, then there will be some little offhand comment or something in the background that will reduce me to giggling incapacitation whilst everyone else wonders “what’s he laughing at?”

Whether this is why I like Douglas Adams, or because I like Douglas Adams, it’s difficult to say.

I’ve been reading it for years and when I drive past a hotblack desiato sign it always makes me laugh!

Just found this on wikipedia, I am weeping at my desk

Censorship

This book (life, the Universe and Everything) is the only one in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series to have been censored in its U.S. edition. An extensive but still incomplete list of the changes between the two versions can be found on an archived web page. The word “asshole” is replaced with the word “kneebiter”, and the word “shit” is replaced with “swut”.

Possibly the most famous example of censorship is in Chapter 22 and 23, which in the U.K. edition mentions that a Rory was an award for the Most Gratuitous Use of the Word ‘****’ in a Serious Screenplay. In the U.S. edition, this was changed to “Belgium” and the text from the original radio series describing “Belgium” as the most offensive word in the galaxy is reused.

I’ve been reading it for years and when I drive past a hotblack desiato sign it always makes me laugh!

Being a Northerner it’s relatively recently, like in the last five years, that I discovered what that referenced. I drove past a sign and nearly crashed the car. I assumed that they’d taken the name from the character, but it’s the other way around.

Hah.

From http://www.islingtonpeople.co.uk/news/Literary-Islington-Hotblack-Desiato/story-4530245-detail/story.html

The late Douglas Adams claimed that he was having difficulty finding a character name to live up to his usual standards of oddness, when he drove past a branch of Hotblack Desiato and ‘nearly crashed the car’.

I swear on my life, the wording on my previous post is a coincidence. Though, a happy one.

Seeing as how I was reading HHGTTG on my palm Vx a loooong time ago (relativley) the kindle pic seems a bit…late.

Didn’t know about the ethernet thing.

DA was a genius, quite like the dirk gently stuff too.

Didn’t know about the ethernet thing.

Nor me. I don’t think it’s true.

The first incarnation of H2G2 was the radio broadcasts in, what, 1978? Ethernet predates that, I’m pretty sure; it was in development in the early 70s IIRC. Even it the term wasn’t coined until DEC days I’d have been surprised if DNA’s little BBC radio play would’ve made it to California by then.

I think what you’ve got yourself there is an urban myth.

Yep – I’d always assumed it was named after ”luminiferous ether” which was made up long before anyone had heard of Mr Prosser and his bulldozers.

did anybody else play the DOS based game? 😀

It wasn’t DOS-based, it was text-based. It’s a Z-machine story file, there’s interpreters for it on just about every platform imaginable; I’ve got it on my (Android) phone.

The BBC re-did it a few years ago for some anniversary or other, online complete with a few user-submitted graphics.

Got it.

This is the BBC’s graphical version. Needs Flash.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml

The original text-only version is playable here. Needs Java.
here

it was DOS on my pentium 33 😛

*remembers to pick up mail before leaving the house otherwise i’ll never be able to get the bablefish machine to work*

It wasn’t on my Atari ST.

I really should have another crack at this. I’ve almost but not quite completed it; throughout the game you come across a number of tools as collectable objects (I think there’s 14 in total; something similar anyway). At the end of the game you need one at random, but if you’ve missed picking one up, the game will randomly ask you for the one you’ve missed. Swine of a thing.

I’d like to think that I remember most of it. Certainly the early parts I could do in my sleep. Don’t forget to feed the dog.

i’d always forget something and end up in the same situation. must’ve and i hesitate to use the word ‘wasted’ but yeah… wasted weeks of my childhood when i could’ve been learning to bunnyhop or something playing that game!

Infocom were responsible for a good deal of my gaming history. H2G2, The Lurking Horror, LGOP et al. Happy days.

Coincidentally, I was playing a text adventure only the other night. There’s an annual “interactive fiction” award for short-form adventures, and a lot of the entrants are playable online this year.

If you’ve sat there wondering what the heck we’re on about, have a punt at this year’s winner, Taco Fiction. It’s nice and gentle.

Damn damn damn, I cannot get Prosser to lie in the mud, cannot compose something pithy and expire in silence

Thank god for google