In fact, if you showed it to a teenager now they'd probably say "What the fuck is a book?"
What's interesting is that 1983 is also the year when, according to a recently unearthed talk, a young Steve Jobs talks about some of the stuff Apple would like to do in the future and ended up predicting several modern developments, including Wi-Fi, the iTunes store, and of course, the iPad. In fact, he actually says the words "We want to put an incredibly great computer in a book you can carry around with you ..."
Now, Jobs gave this talk a few months before Inspector Gadget first aired, so unless he had friends at DiC Entertainment, he probably wasn't directly inspired by Penny's signature tech. That doesn't change the fact that a freaking cartoon accidentally managed to introduce the world to his greatest invention 27 years before he did.
There's more: In 2001, DiC produced a revival called Gadget and the Gadgetinis, in which the Inspector receives several tinier versions of himself, each from a different color ...
Each one has 1/4th of his IQ, so they're legally dogs.
Wait a minute, the Inspector Gadget "model" now comes in smaller versions in a variety of colors? Holy shit! The show predicted the iPod Nano too, first introduced in 2005.
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