Three things I would like to see in reality from the minds of SF:

First is the "Beanstalks" Heinlein talks about in "Friday" - slender, flexible structures many miles long that stick out from various places in the work into the edges of our atmosphere. There would be stations at the tips and shuttles could ferry people and products from one to another easily. High speed elevators would take people and things back and forth from the surface to the tip of the beanstalk.

Second is the wall in the nursery of Bradbury's story "The Veldt" To some extent that could be an whopping big flat screen, but it'd still be really cool. I don't think you could do it with a jumbo-tron type of TV - resolution for those are designed for viewing hundreds of feet away, besides all the stuff you'd need would fill the room.

Third is the Universal Translator used in all the Star Trek series ("Enterprise" is in the process of developing it). What I love about it beyond the fact that it translates thousands of languages immediately, is that it makes the speakers lips move as if they were speaking your language and that it does not translate many "cuss" words. A Klingon cussing in English (Federation Basic) would loose so much fierceness. I do like the fact that the censor's let Picard say Merde once even though he'd never be allowed to say the English equivalent.

but I digress...

I think that little reference was made to the Internet is SF because there wasn't really a lot of need - People in most stories communicate through a telecommunication media. Having a video hook-up to your PC and talking to someone on the internet isn't all that much different than doing it through Ma Bell. Information retrival was talked about and definately networks, and isn't the Internet just a big ole network?

pax yall