Cellphones
Hands down the greatest example of life imitating science fiction. Not only do today's cellphones function in much the same way as the devices seen on Star Trek, the latest generation of flip phones are dead ringers for Captain Kirk and the gang's communicators. In fact, you can even get your own Star Trek cellphone, complete with the distinctive beeps.
PDAs
Star Trek: The Next Generation scores another coup for the franchise when Dr Crusher and her cohorts in sick bay start entering data into a tablet-sized computer device with a stylus. Could be separated at birth from the Palm Pilot.
Virtual reality
When the internet was just a bunch of academics sending one another Ascii text over phone lines at ridiculously slow speeds, Canadian author William Gibson had a vision and penned a short story called Johnny Mnemonic. Three novels, dubbed the Neuromancer trilogy, followed and revolutionised science fiction, and also gave the world the concept of cyberspace - a consensual hallucination experienced every day by billions of legitimate operators in every nation. A few years after Gibson's seminal first book was released in 1984, the first clumsy efforts at bringing his vision to life are released, with mostly poor results. Users often got violently ill from cybersickness, caused by trying to view a moving world in a headset while staying stationary. Nintendo releases Virtual Boy in 1995. It flops, and is pulled off the market a year later.
Reality bytes: sci-fi's biggest hits
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