These Bell engineers had vision

Pierce and David's 1961 memo recommended a number of exhibits [for the New York World's Fair]: "personal hand-carried telephones," "business letters in machine-readable form, transmitted by wire," "information retrieval from a distant computer-automated library," and "satellite and space communications."  By the time the fair opened in April 1964, though, the Bell System exhibits . . . described a more conservative future than the one Pierce and David had envisioned.

Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 229