How is that obsolete?
By the time 2001 rolled around, at least two institutions mentioned in the film (Pan-Am and the USSR) were extinct.
They won’t let you smoke on military or civilian aircraft.
And they seemed to have a never ending supply of those things, too.
How about the “Spock’s Brain” episode of ST, where Scotty is envious of the ion powered space ship?
I recall an old, obscure SF story about radioactive isotopes and medical treatment of radiation problems. It had three inaccuracies that stand out in my mind now:
[ul]
[li]Radiation burns can be treated with a salve.[/li][li]Getting radioactive particles inside you will cause severe tremors as the radiation causes your nerves to misfire. The story’s description made it sound like a severe form of Parkinson’s Disease.[/li][li]Radiation sickness is somehow treatable.[/li][/ul]
Of course, there’s also Blowups Happen, by Heinlein. That was all about nuclear power being based on tightly controlling a chain reaction so it liberates energy without causing an explosion. I don’t know why Heinlein made that particular gaffe: We’ve known since the 1900s that radioactive materials themselves are hot without actively chain-reacting.
The story is discussed in some detail in this thread.
Solution Unsatisfactory is another of Heinlein’s obsolete tales: It describes nuclear weapons being a radioactive dust spread from aircraft.
Asimov’s big computers (not his androids, who had positronic brains) used tubes of various types (going from 50s-style electromechanical things to molecule-scale devices in an odd form of transistorless miniaturization). All of them spoke a symbolic-mathematical code (which I always imagined as APL glyphs :)) until they became advanced enough to talk and none of them had graphical output devices.
Almost all science fiction stories place the culture in which they were written in the future world they create, so you get such anachronisms as the perfect 50s housewife trying to survive on a Mars colony (Heinlein was guilty of situations like this) or a 1910s playboy watching opera on a TV set (Hugo Gernsback). Of course, I don’t think this is what the OP was asking for.
Not only did Asimov use vacuum-tube computers, but I believe they were analog computers. Those are pretty much obsolete.
Many early sci-fi writers under-estimated the expense and difficulty of manned space flight. There are many stories in which astronauts go up to build the first space station - with wrenches and welding torches. Manned space stations are used as TV relay stations, instead of unmanned satellites.
Asimov cheerfully took the credit for predicting the pocket calculator in the Foundation trilogy, although his version of it was analog (as scr4 noted) and input was by turning little knurled wheels around the edge of the device.
John Brunner was the first to predict both the World Wide Web (he called it the “Datanet”) and computer worms and viruses in his terrific 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider. Ironically, he died in 1995 just as the Web was taking off, and fittingly his was the first science fiction author’s death announced over the Internet. However, in The Shockwave Rider he missed out on PCs and envisaged dialup connections from telephones equipped with screens. Well, that isn’t too far off; he still deserves credit for astonishing prescience.
Asimov’s “FOUNDATION” series was written in the early 1950’s and contains some real bloopers-for example, messages were contained in capsules (which needed a special key to open)-sounds like he never heard of crytograpy. Also, libraries are still around in the 36th century (while men are travelling around the galaxy).He also describes the planet TRANTOR as being covered by metal-I guess he didn’t know that you need a biosphere to regenrate the oxygen.
As others have pointed out, SF reflects the ideas and customs of the times in which the stories were written. The stuff from the mid-50’s accurately reflects the current ideas such as : cheap atomic power being applied to houses and cars; rocket travel, etc. What I find interesting is how slow we have been in adopting modern innovations-we still dress in basically the same styles from the 1900’s (where are all those capes and form-fitting clothes from the SF novels?), we build our houses to look like they were made in 1600! (where are the all-plastic houses of tomorrow?); and we have a legal system that is right from the year 1300(and use an archaic leagl lingo from the same era!).
No, one of the very terrorist threats the military is worried about today is spraying or scattering nuclear materials over an area as a weapon. And, since it is a radioactive material, it counts as a form of nuclear warfare.
Not even remotely close. I can beat that by 30 years. 
Murry Leinster, in the short story “A Logic Called Joe”, ca 1946(?) has a world where everyone has a personal computer (a “logic”) which are all hooked up in a national (or world) network.
It’s a surprisingly accurate look at home personal computers (compared to stuff like Asimov’s Omnivac.). What’s even weirder, while Omnivac and other SF supercomputers were spitting out punch-cards as their output method, Logics have “vision-screens” He even anticipated the need for in-home repairs and parental filters to prevent kids from looking at smut.
“You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vison reciever used to only it’s got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. [He explains how it works and that you can get TV broadcasts through your logic, you can phone people through your logic, logics can act as answering machine] But besides that if you punch in the weather forcast or who won today’s race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House during the Garfield adminstration [or stock quotations], that comes on the screens too. [It also does math, and keeps books and it’s connected to all the other logics in the country]”
And the whole premise of the story is that one particular Logic goes insane in a way that corrupts every other Logic on the “network”.
I’ve got no doubt that Brunner’s is actually closer to the nuts-and-bolts of internet in method (how it actually works, etc), but Leinster’s story is certainly close enough to the actuality of the internet (what it does. He’s got kids who’re supposed to be looking for information for homework trying to get doity pictures! Talk about nailing the social changes!) that I give him full credit!
Fenris
Seen most peoples’ bodies lately? We’re better off without form fitting clothes…
http://www.lgarde.com/people/papers/structures.html It’s mylar, not rubber, but…
Actually the first US “telecommunications satellite,” the Echo 1, was an inflatable polyester balloon.
W00t another Brunner fan among us!
I would argue that Shockwave rider is among one of the very few cyberpunk books that have NOT become obsolete in these last few years. The predictions he makes in the book are chillingly accurate (when I read the circus scene, my mind always invariably wanders to Jerry Springer).
His other books are also suprisingly future proof although he does have a flaw in that he far overestimated a computers ability for accurate simulations.
The late C.M. Kornbluth was one of the most prescient SF writers of the 1950’s-read his “THE MARCHING MORONS” for a terrifyingly accurate look at the future! He also wrote a nifty little number called “THE BLACK BAG”- scathing look at what happens when advanced technology falls into the wrong hands. As I say, the startling thing is how far ahead we’ve gone technologically, yet how conservative we remain in our architectural and clothing styles.
Derleth, with regards to radiation sickness, I’ll agree with you on the induced tremors, but what’s wrong with the other two? Any salve that helps burns will help radiation burns (heck, a sunburn is a radiation burn, of sorts), and radiation poisoning is treatable, if not curable.
Another one I’ll throw into the mix, because at the time, it was superb science: In Niven’s “The Hole Man”, a miniscule black hole is found to be part of an ancient alien communication device. Everything about the story would work perfectly, except that such tiny black holes are extremely short-lived.
And Fenris, I was thinking “Wasn’t ‘A Logic Named Joe’ before that”, when I saw Jomo Mojo’s post. I agree, that was a remarkably prescient story.
I think there were quite a few of these in “Brave New World”. The one that springs to mind is the “Malthusian Belt” worn by women. I find it a little surprising that Huxley did not predict the contraceptive pill, given that the society he envisions uses other types of pills so much.
For the science-fiction-as-a-product-of-its-time hijack, I find BNW to be embarassingly so. There’s such a men and girls atmosphere to it, with the alpha male scientists going out with the gamma (or whatever it was) female technicians. It’s bizarre that Huxley thought that type of thing would not change, that there would not be top female scientists; there already were some when he was writing.
Qadgop, aren’t you thinking of Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earch? (or maybe Frankenstein?)
The protagonists of Burroughs’ At the Earch’s Core got there by drilling down in a giant “mole” - Burroughs doesn’t say exactly where, but I’ve always assumed they started out from somewhere in the U.S.
Most science fiction has bad predictions of the future. If you’re reading science fiction for the accuracy of its predictions, you’re reading it for the wrong reason.
There were many ways to get there. In Tarzan at the Earth’s Core the ape-man paid a visit to Pellucidar via a blimp to the north pole, which entered the earth thru an enormous hole.