Technology 2001: The Future of Computing and Communications

Clarke's name on the cover is a trifle misleading. He just writes a brief introduction. His name is used because he is famous, and the title plays off his "2001: A Space Odyssey". The actual contents of the book are chapters by various technologists, speculating on the future, as written in 1990-1. Given that this is now 2006, you can read the book as a retrospective, for an assessment of how accurate they were, in just projecting forward 9 or so years. The most striking feature is how the concept of browsing is not that prominent. When the articles were written, the first browsers were still to be coded, and WWW or the "Web" had not yet emerged as axiomatic labels.