“A tiny square of light, known as the ‘cursor,’ began to move up the face of the tube. It was something like the bouncing ball that used to hop from word to word in song lyrics on movie screens. […] When the screen fills (it holds about a hundred and twenty-five words), the writer just keeps going. For every new line that comes on at the bottom, a line disappears at the top. To go back and look things over, just hit the SCRL key. The whole composition will roll backward or forward like a scroll.”

“The General Motors Futurama was built around the idea that the human population—two-thirds of the way through the twentieth century—had ample room in which to explode, and proved the thesis with models of future machines and future cities, to be built in trackless wastelands. A G.M. machine a couple of hundred yards long would soon subdue the rain forest. Out in front of it, smaller machines would run around felling trees with laser beams. Blink, blink. The red beams sliced the trees and they toppled. The great mother machine now took over, moving forward to eat the trees and all the understory, meanwhile extruding four-lane highways from its distant rear. Cities sprang up in the bush to either side.”