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iPad

How Stanley Kubrick‘s '2001: A Space Odyssey' predicted the iPad

By Brooke Crothers Fox News
Published

File photo - American actor Gary Lockwood on the set of "2001: A Space Odyssey," written and directed by Stanley Kubrick. (Photo by Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)

Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” offered a glimpse of an iPad-style device more than 40 years before Apple launched the wildly popular tablet.

Kubrick’s movie, famous for its sentient, psychotic AI in the form of a HAL 9000 computer, also featured a device called the “Newspad,” a progenitor to the iPad, as pointed out by the British Film Institute (BFI) and Far Out Magazine.

The device appears in a scene where astronauts David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) watch news aboard the spaceship Discovery One.

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The scene begins when astronaut Bowman descends a ladder with the Newspad in one hand and enters the spaceship’s central hub. Then he walks over to the table where he will sit down to eat with Poole and places the Newspad down. Poole is already sitting, watching his Newspad as he eats.

They then watch a BBC news program, which includes the BBC anchor’s interview of HAL, on the devices.

The Newspad is described in detail in a letter from one of Kubrick’s collaborators, according to the British Film Institute. The letter also asks for technical assistance from IBM.

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It was also described in Arthur C. Clarke's companion novel, according to Engadget.

The movie's production team anticipated the digital newspapers of today, the British Film Institute said. "The 2001 production team saw the Newspad as featuring instant access to a range of popular periodicals. Long lists of imagined, publication-specific headlines for the year 2001 were conceived," according to the BFI.

It alternatively appears in the movie as the IBM Telepad. A closeup of a screenshot taken from the BBC news transmission scene from the movie shows the IBM Telepad logo in the bottom right-hand corner of the device.

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Apple launched its first iPad in a blaze of publicity in 2010. In October 2018 Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the tech giant had sold over 400 million of the tablets since the iPad's launch.

Fox News' James Rogers contributed to this article.