"When he tired of official reports, Floyd would plug his foolscap-sized News pad into the ship's information circuit. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers…He sometimes wondered if the News pad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the News pad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg."