* Geosynchronous communications satellites - ArthurCeeClarke, though he proposed it in a 1945 edition of "Wireless World" rather than in a ScienceFiction story.
* Satellite TV used to broadcast all varieties of content and escape government censorship - ArthurCeeClarke
* Submarines under the polar icecap - JulesVerne
* Life on Europa - ArthurCeeClarke (wait for it)
* Life on Dagobah - GeorgeLucas (wait for it)
* Discovery of Martian moons Phobos & Deimos - Jonathan Swift (early 18th century)
* Water/ice under the lunar surface - RobertHeinlein and Hergé - but now it seems there is in fact very little or no water. See: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Oct06/campbell.lunarice.html ''It now seems as though there is in fact quite a bit of water http://www.hindu.com/2009/09/23/stories/2009092357770100.htm''
* Effective revolutionary cells using computer technology to facilitate secret communication - RobertHeinlein's ''TheMoonIsaHarshMistress''
* Computer-aided design - robot drafting machine (Drafting Dan) in RobertHeinlein's ''A Door into Summer''.
* L-Dopa - There are uncanny parallels between a factual account in ''Awakenings'' (1973) by neurologist Oliver Sacks, about mental patients given the drug L-Dopa, and Daniel Keyes' ''Flowers for Algernon'' (1959), about a moron made smart...
* Space station re-entry (the sky is falling) - "Chicken Little"
* People cracking up under the strain of modern life and going on a killing spree or becoming depressed/stressed/suicidal (JohnBrunner, ''StandOnZanzibar'' & ''TheShockwaveRider'') -- though this has happened throughout history
* Crackers writing worms that move between computers on the global communication networks - JohnBrunner, ''TheShockwaveRider''
* Hacking as political activism - JohnBrunner, ''TheShockwaveRider''
* The laser printer - JohnBrunner, ''TheShockwaveRider''
* A government-sponsored futures market to mine the WisdomOfCrowds [proposed: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/29/MN126930.DTL,  but killed after criticism: http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/29/terror.market/index.html] - JohnBrunner, ''TheShockwaveRider''
* Travel to the moon - JulesVerne and HerbertGeorgeWells, though their method was cannon shell and anti-gravity respectively; equally accurate was MotherGoose, with the aid of a rocking chair and geese, and CyranoDeBergerac too -- no, one of Bergerac's methods was *more* accurate than Verne and Wells.  Reread it and see for yourself!
* Rocket travel to the moon - ArthurCeeClarke, also RobertHeinlein (Man Who Sold The Moon) (and CyranoDeBergerac (although IIRC his rockets started out as balloons))
* The water bed - RobertHeinlein (In ''ExpandedUniverse'', Heinlein mentions that a water bed company successfully fought a patent by using one of his stories as prior art.  They sent him one as a "thank you" gift and, ironically, he hated it. [My memory of ''ExpandedUniverse'' says that he never got to try it out. But I don't have the book at hand to check])
* Waldoes - also RobertHeinlein, in "Waldo".
* Mp3 players - predicted in 1991 in an otherwise terrible cyberpunk book by Jonathan Littel named ''BadVoltage''
* Neutron stars - LarryNiven described a neutron star in "Neutron Star" - OK, he listened to science, but they were not discovered until later.
* The Internet - Probably various places, but in an early DoctorWho episode 'The War Machines' (1966) there was talk of all the computers of the world connecting to each other to form a network.
* DoctorWho also predicted that the UnitedKingdom would enter the decimal system for money.
* Cellular phones and PDAs = Communicators and Tricorders - GeneRoddenberry 
* Zagat's restaurant guide on a PDA with wireless internet - ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''. Not only the same feature set, the same editing model for the content! Cool eh?
* WikiPedia - ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''. Not only the same feature set, the same editing model for the content! Cool eh?
* Viagra(tm) - PhilDick, ''Galactic Pot-Healer'' (1969), chp. 14. He called it "Hardovax". {D.E.C. fan, eh?}
* Prisoners used as an organ bank - LarryNiven, "The Jigsaw Man" (196?). In 2006 China was accused of this [http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1756808,00.html].
* Recognition that there are only eight planets in the Solar System - JohnVarley, in his "Eight Worlds" stories (well, not really, since Pluto was one of those worlds)
* Tanks - HerbertGeorgeWells
* Nuclear Weapons - HerbertGeorgeWells
* Voice recognition for authoring - IsaacAsimov's ''Second Foundation''
** Orwell's 1984
* Videophones and video conferencing - E.M. Forsters' "TheMachineStops"
* Debit cards - Edward Bellamy's ''Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887''
* Scanner and OpticalCharacterRecognition - RobertHeinlein's ''TheMoonIsaHarshMistress''
* The rivalry between Ruby and Python - Samuel R. Delany's 1966 ''Babel-17'': ""[D]o you follow the wrestling? Most people think it's illegal, but you can watch it there. Ruby and Python are on display this evening. If you'll just make that one stop with me first, I know you'll find it fascinating." (part 5 chapter 1)

''I'll buy the cellular phones, but '''my''' PersonalDigitalAssistant won't tell me anything about the presence of humanoid lifeforms behind that rock.'' It could if the humanoid was BlueTooth-equipped. '''My''' PDA can tell me the next show time of ''Rollerball'' at the mall, which is more important on this planet. ''Actually, wouldn't those little pad-looking things that Yeoman Rand was always having Kirk sign be closer to a PDA? In StarTrekTheNextGeneration the Padds were actually the same form factor of a modern PDA--of course that's 'cause they stole that idea from XeroxParc...''

I'm with LarryNiven: I'm surprised organ banks (and increased use of capital punishment to supply them) haven't happened.  ''Driving a car carelessly has built-in capital punishment.''

NealStephenson in ''SnowCrash'' (I think) described a safety device for riding motorcycles - instead of wearing a helmet, you have an inflatable collar around your neck. In case of a crash, it inflates instantaneously and protects you, rather like an airbag.  A few years ago, I read that a Japanese company came up with a similar device, albeit to protect construction workers falling off buildings. -- BurkhardKloss

Actually ''SnowCrash'' is rife with good near-term extrapolations like that.  Another that he had were eyeglasses that were monitors -- instead of looking into a monitor tiny RGB solid-state lasers at the edge of the glasses would paint the picture onto your retina.  I just read last week in SlashDot that there's a company that's now doing that, albeit with RGB LED's instead of diode lasers... -- KyleBrown

When NealStephenson wrote ''SnowCrash'', Georgia Tech had already been working on a prototype of that technology for some time.

I've read most of the stuff cited above and a lot more besides. I got turned on to the "classics" at about the age of eleven at my local Jr. High School. My mother used to give me the hardest time for "wasting my mind reading that fantasy." These days -- 35 years later -- I never turn down the opportunity to rub her nose in the fact that I was reading all that "fantasy" about things like microwave ovens, cell phones, PDAs, embedded defibrillators, reusable spacecraft, communications satellites, lasers...I could go on and on. Heh. I guess that's what started me on the road to becoming an embedded systems engineer. I always wanted to build neat stuff like I read about as a kid. -- MartySchrader

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See Also: FulfilledScienceFictionProphecies, TechnologyDisappointments, FailedScienceFictionProphecies, PredictionsFromFortyYearsAgo
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CategoryScienceFiction