The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress/Trivia


 * Technology Marches On: Mike invents computer-generated imagery, to the shock and surprise of the humans around him, who never imagined such a thing could be possible (he even gives himself a digital screen appearance as a human, and takes quite a while adjusting the CGI to achieve full realism). Meanwhile, in the real world, it takes a bank of supercomputers and a none-too-small team of professionals to achieve the same result, and they take a somewhat longer time. Of course, it can be argued that Mike, having hookups across Luna, as well as having access to a large chunk of everything humanity has ever written down, is both a bank of supercomputers and a team of professionals. And it helps that he can think far faster than a human.
 * It's specifically mentioned in the text that in order to fake one single video image in real-time, Mike had to co-opt virtually all of the spare computing capacity on Luna.
 * Manny protests that what Mike was attempting was impossible: this would require thousands, maybe millions of calculations per second. This is called a megahertz; the Intel 8086 was released a mere decade after the book and in a single chip represented virtually the entire processing power on Luna more than a century hence as Heinlein imagined it. To be fair, Moore's Law only was articulated in popular press a year before the book and the full impact of the transistor revolution had yet to be felt or even named as such.
 * This trope affects pretty much all of Heinlein's relatively near-future fiction, particularly computers and calculating devices of all kinds.