Translation: "Our infantry will stay in the cover until the rockets silence the rebel armored cars, commander" - "Keep us posted about the flow of the operation, Major!"
The concept of a portable device that opens to reveal a screen and keyboard combination has been around a lot longer than you might think.
A comic collector from Prilep, Macedonia whose name is Mende Petreski was browsing through his collection and happened upon a panel in Politikin Zabavnik weekly published June 14, 1974. The comic is a Serbian translation of a Flash Gordon episode originally drawn around 1937 by Alex Raymond.
The panel clearly shows Ming the Merciless communicating with his home world of Mongo on what looks like it could easily be a Sony VAIO laptop computer.
Which seems more far-fetched to you? Jim Kirk and the Enterprise encountering a planet that is in every way an exact duplicate of Earth (Star Trek Season One episode “Miri”), or a device drawn in a comic book in the 1930s becoming a household item some 70 years later? We’d have to call that one a draw.
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