An interesting perspective at the dawn of the computer age, showing tremendous foresight for the advancements to be made in the years ahead.
He went restlessly to old Dik Morin and demanded the helmet that was tuned to the memory-machine on the ship. He sat down, turned it on and carefully explored the memory-files he needed.
Those files were, of course, the records which had supplanted printed books. Wearing a helmet, one could explore an entire library, cross-indexed as thoroughly as the memories of a living brain and giving the same sensations as the examination of a personal, individual memory. The memory-machines made the memories of ten thousand or a hundred thousand minds available to an individual. They had made the achievements of a galactic civilization possible. No person could have even begun to learn all the facts of even a sub-branch of a given science. But, wearing a memory-helmet, he had them all at his command. And, using a helmet for research, the facts he found and used became his individual memories, too, so that education was simply a matter of making use of facilities provided for accomplishment. No two persons ever quite gathered exactly the same education. But every man remembered what he found useful of all the knowledge stored up by the race – and every man had all knowledge available to him as one of his rights as a citizen.