What's the one thing that '2001' got right in 1968?

The real future is hiding in plain sight in "2001: A Space Odyssey." But few people who saw Stanley Kubrick's dazzling prediction of things to come — the most talked-about movie of 1968 — gave it much thought at the time.

The key scene occurs about 55 minutes into the film.

After awesome images of Ferris wheel space stations, lunar colonies, Pan Am moon flights and a zero-gravity stewardess who walks upside down, there is a brief moment when astronauts Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, bound for Jupiter, watch a BBC news broadcast beamed from Earth.

Only they're not watching on a TV. They're watching on a flat device, about the size of a writing tablet.

The movie, which was released 50 years ago Tuesday, doesn't name the gadget. But Arthur C. Clarke's novel — written contemporaneously — calls it a "newspad."  A photo inset of the scene, in the original Signet paperback, calls it "a kind of flat, portable TV device which can display any type of visual or printed material."

And there it is.

Chances are, you're reading this story on a newspad. Only it's called an iPad, or a tablet.

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As a matter of fact, Samsung defended itself in a 2011 copyright infringement suit by arguing that its Galaxy Tablet, which Apple claimed was an imitation of its iPad, was actually derived from "2001."

"Clarke was especially keen on innovations in communications," says Martin Collins, curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, which is presenting a 50th anniversary tribute of Kubrick's film from April 8 to May 28, complete with a walk-though mockup of the hotel room in the final scene.

Bowled over by "2001's" space stations and moon rockets, few viewers remarked on the "newspad" in 1968. But it was the film's most breathtakingly accurate prediction.

It's not just that the film's depiction of an LCD screen is almost spot-on. It's that the "future" — our present — seems to be largely centered around information technology.

Communications, it turned out, would be the great leap forward. Not manned space travel — which has advanced only modestly, and in some ways retreated, from the days of the 1960s and 1970s moon missions.

"The movie sort of hit the high point of political support for human space exploration," Collins says. Once the Apollo 11 mission delivered Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon's surface in July 1969, public interest in space travel started to wane. "By the time of the 1970s, that moment had passed," he said.

Of course "2001" became a hit, a touchstone for a generation, for reasons that have little to do with any of this.

The spectacle, the stunning special effects (less stunning now, perhaps, if only because of George Lucas and others who followed in Kubrick's footsteps), the puzzler of a story about an alien monolith that somehow guides human evolution, the iconic "dum-dum-dum —TA-DAH!" of "Thus Spake Zarathustra" on the soundtrack, are all part of the culture now.

"What was astonishing about it was everything," says Leonard Maltin, the film critic and host of the "Maltin on Movies" podcast, originally from Teaneck.

"When I was growing up, sci-fi was a somewhat disreputable genre, associated with cheesy B movies," Maltin says. "This was cutting-edge, state-of-the-art. We had never seen anything like it. … There could never have been a 'Star Wars' without '2001.'" 

It almost wasn't a hit. Critics panned it. Word of mouth was that it was dull and confusing. Audiences stayed away. Exhibitors were about to pull the plug.

But "2001," five years in the making, had the great good fortune to be released on April 3, 1968, which meant it came coasting in on the previous year's "summer of love." 

Hippies were everywhere by 1968. And they discovered "2001" en masse. It was, they said, a great "trip."

"I don't think Kubrick ever used the word psychedelic to describe the movie, but that's how it was embraced by many audiences," Maltin says.

Theater owners were astonished to see boys in tie-dye shirts and girls in muumuus lining up at the ticket booth again and again, taking seats in the front row, lighting up marijuana and dropping acid at the intermission so as to be fully primed for the psychedelic climax. "It's God!" someone screamed in one theater, rushing toward the screen where the big black monolith had appeared.

Today, we think of  "2001: A Space Odyssey" as somehow characteristic of the late '60s, a classic "head" movie. But its real roots lay earlier, in the square, early 1960s — the time of the Gemini space program and the 1964 New York World's Fair.

Like Futurama, the fair's famous world-of-tomorrow exhibit, the film was to be a "you are there" experience, with a strong gee-whiz factor. "The adventure that put today's man in tomorrow's spacecraft — today!" read the original ads.

 "2001," as a result, became the first — and to date, last — sci-fi movie to try to accurately forecast the future, based on real scientific information. No expense was spared (the film had a $10 million  budget, more than $70 million in today's money). Armies of experts were engaged to advise on every last readout and toggle switch. "None of this was plucked out of thin air," Maltin says.

All of it made for astonishing visuals. But today, 50 years later, we can see "2001's" makers were both too fanciful, and not fanciful enough.

Orbiting Hilton hotels? Moon bases? Manned Jupiter missions? We're nowhere near.

Not so much because of technical challenges, perhaps, as financial and cultural ones. It didn't occur to Kubrick, Clarke, and the other "2001" creators that the amped-up funding of the space race wouldn't last forever. Or that the bulk of Americans might simply lose interest in space travel.

Talking, thinking, autonomous computers? Closer.

HAL 9000, the film's most fascinating (and sinister) character, could soon have a real-life counterpart. A.I. — artificial intelligence — is now one of the world's leading industries, and computers, experts tell us, are on the verge of becoming self-aware. "Integrated Information Theory" is the field of study that looks at this alarming possibility.

Odd, as well, is what the makers of "2001" didn't anticipate.

No suggestion of an Internet. No evidence of a personal computer, or the miniaturization of components. (HAL's mainframe is as big as your living room, and probably contains a fraction of the information on your phone.)

Also odd: Kubrick's futuristic gadgets all seem to be dedicated devices. His Picturephone is just a Picturephone. It's not, like Skype or FaceTime, one app among hundreds.

"They were trying to present things that would have some kind of familiarity," Collins says. "To present the equivalent of an iPhone or an Android would have been less easy to understand."

A phone that fits in your pocket, and is also a TV, newspaper, book, camera, alarm clock, recording device, message board and game console — that's something even the wildly imaginative creators of "2001" couldn't dream up. And something the audience might not have understood if they had.

But kudos for the "newspad." That came pretty close.

'2001': But what's it about?

In 1968, audiences were baffled, and critics were irritated. "2001: A Space Odyssey" was the subject of every party conversation, every bar-room bet. What was that psychedelic light show, that baby in a bubble, and what one disgruntled viewer called "that damn two-by-four"?

Kubrick didn't help. Viewers, he said, had to decide for themselves. But his fellow screenwriter, Arthur C. Clarke, did explain, in great detail, in his novel version what Kubrick's enigmatic movie is all about.

So the next time you're in a bar talking movies, and your friend tells you "2001" makes no sense, impress him with the following quick recap and explanation:

Part 1: The Dawn of Man: Four million years ago, a mysterious black monolith — actually an alien teaching machine — instructs our ape-man ancestors how to use a bone as a tool. Man's evolution begins.

Part 2: By 2001, man has become a spacegoing creature, and that primitive tool has evolved into a spaceship. At this second evolutionary crossroads, another alien monolith is discovered buried in the Moon. Exposed to sunlight for the first time in 4 million years, it emits a powerful radio signal, clearly some sort of alarm, aimed directly at Jupiter. 

Part 3: Jupiter Mission —18 Months Later: A manned spaceship is sent to Jupiter to investigate what might have received the signal. The true purpose of the mission is unknown to the astronauts; only the computer HAL 9000 knows, and it's been programmed to lie. The computer's inner conflict causes it to make mistakes. Threatened with disconnection, HAL goes berserk and kills all but one of the crew before it's deactivated. 

Part 4: Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite: The lone surviving astronaut, Dave (Keir Dullea), discovers another of the alien monoliths floating around Jupiter. This monolith is a "star gate" that opens to whisk him — in psychedelic color — to some other part of the universe. There, in an alien observation tank tricked out to look like a hotel room, Dave is readied for the next stage of human evolution. In the final scene, Dave has been reborn as a "star child." Freed from tools forever, he is now a creature of pure energy, like his alien mentors.