Ever watch an older show or movie that had them use technology or make a reference to something that was current when it was made, but over time has become dated? What are some examples?
Let’s start with the latest and work backward.
The long and wondrous pattern of sounds from a modem connecting to the Internet.
All of Heinlein’s stuff wherein people are doing complex calculations on slide rules. Even if they had computers in-universe they still did the math themselves by hand for critical, time-sensitive calculations.
I never watched The Rockford Files, but wasn’t the opening of the show his answering machine?
Telefon… payphones. Har-de-har-har!
I like the one from Friends where Chandler is bragging about the spec of his new PC. It’s not just that the specs are pathetic by current standards; probably not even smart-watch level. But he also uses some tech terms that might have sounded fancy at the time but people are more tech-savvy now and it’s obviously gobbledegook IIRC.
Oh and of course the whole movie Hackers.
In general any reference to computers in movies is not “current technology”, it’s “out of the writer’s ass technology”. Enhance.
I like Pérez-Reverte’s La piel del tambor (I don’t think it’s been translated to English) because his description of the hacker’s setup rings true: not so fancy computer, the fastest connection available for that time and location, and the hacking is script-based. The total opposite of the usual “12 computer screens which are all just showing parts of the same image and a skinny dude typing furiously on the keyboard as if hitting the keys harder was gonna make the electrons move faster.”
The first line of Neuromancer.
Which to somebody younger is going to mean “blue cloudless sky”, not “static grey”.
On Futurama, Amy has a cellphone so small she keeps swallowing it by accident. When watching with my gf who’s significantly younger than me, I had to pause and explain what this joke was about (basically, before smart phones, one of the main selling points for cellphones was how small they were; how comfortably they could fit in your pocket. There was a race to miniaturize – which of course current tech benefits from – but few are concerned with having the smallest phone now)
Also, everything about Johnny Mnemonic
William Gibson’s works in general, I think, are going to go through a period where they are uncomfortably goofy - maybe they will emerge on the other side as cherished vintage SF - in the same way that ‘golden age’ SF is cherished even though it contains unlikely things such as robots made from gears and relays and 1920s-Style Ray Guns
Let it Ride. A 1989 (?) movie starring Richard Dreyfuss, about a perpetual loser at the horse race track, who has (finally) a winning day.
In the movie, the track has windows for separate wagers–there are $2, $5, $10, $20, and $50 windows. At one point, our hero bets (oh, I cannot remember, but let’s go with) $500, and stands at the $50 window, while the mutuel teller pumps out ten $50 win tickets. I remember those long-ago days, when I first started going to the track.
But today’s racetrack totalisator systems are computerized and use the “ABC” system: “All Betting and Cashing,” any window, any bet, any amount. I can bet a $2 win ticket at any window, a $7 place ticket at any window, a $3 boxed exactor at any window, or a $1 part-wheel triactor: 5 on top with 3/6 to all at any window. I get one single ticket to indicate my wager(s), not ten, as in the movie. If I win, I can collect from any window.
Let it Ride is a fun film, and I still enjoy it on repeated watchings, but it bears little resemblance to today’s racetrack betting.
The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey had the logo of the phone company plastered all over the place, for instance on the visual console where you could see the person you were talking too, a fun thing to imagine in 1969.
Almost immediately, the phone company (AT&T, there was really only the one, at the time) changed its logo to something more modern, making that aspect of this futuristic film look ridiculously dated, really soon after the movie came out. So 2001 looked old-fashioned even in 1972.
Anything post-1990 that shows random criminals buying assault rifles or pistols day-of in big cities like New York City or Los Angeles. You still see it in cop shows all the time despite the fact in those kind of cities you have to both apply for a firearms license and go through a waiting period. A Critic episode in 1995 has somebody buying a gun from a vending machine which may be applicable to other places but in no way represents New York City at all.
These are all dated throwbacks to the pre-Gun Control Act of 1968 laws back when there were gun companies inside of Los Angeles importing really shitty cheap guns by the container load and selling them legally without any restrictions. By the 90’s it became pretty much impossible to do this because of subsequent gun laws but older writers still tend to act like buying a gun in NYC is as easy as throwing a few $100 bills at a gun shop and immediately leaving with an AK-47.
All the folks who get a critical phone call…on their flip phones.
In “The Odyssey”, Odysseus travels around the Mediterranean using a trireme instead of an airplane and uses a bronze sword instead of a gun. When’s the last time you saw someone wielding a bronze sword? Took me right out of the story. He didn’t even text his wife that he was going to be late.
In Star Trek: TOS, they were always plugging in “tapes.” Make of it what you will.
Here’s Commodore Decker fondling a coupleà la Captain Queeg.
Didn’t Bram Stoker have Van Helsing use a phonograph to record his findings in the original book Dracula?
Haven’t read it in a while, but you can bet Dr. Seward was using a dictaphone in his sanatorium.
In Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo and in George O. Smith’s Venus Equilaterlal stories, all written in the 1940s, they use mechanical “computers” obviously modeled on Norden Bombsights and the like to compute trajectories for spacecraft. It was a reasonable enough extrapolation at the time, in that pre-electronic computer era, but it seems really weird and quant today. The Smith stories, in fact, all involve analog rather than digital electronics and the result is that even “fantasy” technology, like the teleportation device they build, is al based on an analog model of the world, rather than a digital one. When they teleport a glass cube, for instance, they don’t scan the cube somehow and retain knowledge of the coordinates of the pieces (as we’d likely imagine it today). The teleporter acts the way the old pre-telephone “FAX”-type machines did, scanning the item line by line and teleporting it that way. As a result, if there’s a phase error or a frequency mismatch (as there frequently was in those old image-transmitting systems), the transmitted item showed the results. In this case, the glass cube came out with a twist in it, making it a glass spiral.
I was re-reading Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land recently, and what got to me, again, was the lack of digital technology. the “spy recorder” they plant near Valentine Michael Smith’s room uses a spring-loaded reel-to-reel recorder to avoid detection, whereas today we’d use digital storage. The way they send their telegram-like messages, using a sending office and telephones, all seems weird in a world filled with e-mail, Twitter, and Instagram. I can’t fault him for not accurately forseeing the future, but Heinlein was so often and for so long immune to a lot of this because he had guessed enough about coming developments , or imagined things too far in the future to be eclipsed by a few developments, but now the cumulative effect of multiple unforeseen advances are taking their toll, and making his work finally appear dated.
Star Trek: The next generation.
Data says his processor is capable of 60 trillion operations per second (in the 24th century).
That is about 1000 times slower than a modern supercomputer. Back in the late 80s though, I’m sure it sounded pretty fast.
Which, amusingly, were roughly the size of 1990s-vintage 3.5" floppy disks.