In 1993 I wrote in the online ASCII magazine Grist about this thing I called Knowledge Central. All books would be deposited in a electronic central repository and then:

With a hand-held communicator connected to KC over a 14,000 baud internal radio modem anyone anywhere in the world, from the hottest desert to the deepest jungle to the highest mountain will be able to access and search the combined knowledge base of the entire American publishing industry output and, later, the world. By implication this is the storehouse of all of mankind’s knowledge.

using a search engine with this capability:

The key to Knowledge Central is that the links are not embedded in the texts, which would mean a lot of work, but are created by the software that resides in Knowledge Central. For example the cursor is placed under the word “castles”. If requested the software will ask questions to deduce context and then run from there. No links are embedded in the text which uses the word “castles.”  What will be displayed will be book titles. IE first 100 that mention the word you chose. Or if you chose a reference you will immediately jump to that. In the beginning the system will ask, if it is unsure, is this a title?

and finally:

How it will be for our Grandchildren Knowledge Central will grow to include everything – sound recordings, moving pictures and text. To prevent abuse of the sound and moving pictures systems interactivity will be limited to x minutes duration. Maybe for certain consumer products this will be entered x years after release.

So I realize now I got lucky in talking about all this stuff. Most of the other stuff I wrote about KC doesn’t translate, but the point is that all that stuff is here now. So where to we go from here?

We put it all on a satellite (the Satellite of Questions and Answers to All We Know – SQUAWK) and sling it into long term orbit, with an update capability (somehow). And we do that because the Doomsday Clock stands at 5 minutes to midnight now and it would nice if something survived us. How to do it? Don’t know. More – I hope – later.

It’s called SQUAWK because we are just a scrappy bunch of seagulls – 6.7 billion of us – squabbling over this little patch of earth and water protected by a sphere of air.