> He was a gadget freak without doubt...

He even wrote for the UK version of MacUser

Stephen Fry is proud to have been the person who bought the 3rd Apple computer in the UK.

He claims Adams bought the first two.

Conkers is just a childhood reference, like "pocket money" but one that doesn't translate very well globally.

"Marbles" might work as a replacement? Something you valued greatly as a child, so if you were holding up a spacecraft as a wayward youth you would demand it as a ransom.

Interesting... It never made sense to me that a spaceship captain just would happen to have chestnuts on board his ship, so I guessed it might be something like candies. A generic term for things that amuse children works too. I still feel like Adams was referring to something specific.

H2G2 seems clickbaity for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Though I'm more likely to click knowing it--or perhaps I don't know it enough and everyone else knows H2G2.

It's my personal blog, with no ads, and I didn't submit this post to HN. I just used H2G2 as that's what came to mind as I was typing the title. Not everyone is out for eyeballs.

Since the fiction predate the tech, what if the fiction simply inspired the tech. Making it less prescient but still valuable.

Conkers are definitely the chestnuts, they are ubiquitous in England, where Adams spent a lot of time, and a well understood reference to a childhood game here. A film that recently did the unlikely events driving the plot device very well was Everything everywhere all the time. It never occurred to me that they could have been inspired by Douglas Adams.

Surprisingly few people know about the web site https://h2g2.com, which was started by Adams. It's encyclopædiaish in the way that Ford Prefect's book is, rather than being like Wikipedia (and it happens to be a couple of years older). Worth the occasional browse.

These days I often find myself wishing I could find The Outside of the Asylum