I remember an episode of Columbo (early 70s?) where the whole plot revolved around a murderer’s creating an alibi for himself by using that incredibly high-tech device, the telephone answering machine. Imagine, remotely triggering a pre-recorded telephone call!
Star Trek TOS: Their main computer is not as good at voice synthesis as a Commodore 64. (all com pu tors and ro bots must speak in a high ly ar ti fi cial man ner)
Also, not a movie but I guffaw at all the old science fiction stories where centuries in the future spaceships get the calculations for their hyperspace jumps from gigantic vacuum tube computers.
(In fact I could start a whole thread on quaintly anachronistic SF)
I don’t recall that one, but I DO recall Alec Baldwin as a doctor, and he has a tendency to misprounounce medical terms. “I’m afraid it might be…Canker” (instead of cancer)
Not funny because the tech is now outdated, but because the writer’s seem to have no clue regarding of how fast the tech of their own time becomes outdated.
A mediocre movie from the 80’s called Future Past involves a young geek whose big experiment needs more computer power. He gets visited by his future self who gives him a chip that lets him do his experiment. Anyway, one of the quotes from future-geek that cracked me up was:
“This chip is from 20 years in the future. It’s four times faster than anything available today.”
Bashing Wrath of Khan might be amusing (the novelization refers to a massive computer game that takes up - gasp - fifty megs!) but the Genesis simulation animation still looks pretty cool.
So, if I’m making a contemporary movie, should I avoid showing any state-of-the art consumer electronics, because twenty years in the future some smartass will laugh at it?
I’m surprised noone’s mentioned , Weird Science yet.
These kids made a woman on a computer that probably wasn’t powerful enough to send email.
Funny stuff.
Just thought of a 50s B-movie worth mentioning, though I regret I don’t remember the name. Something like “Mission to the Moon”.
Anyway, at one point after our brave explorers land on the moon in horribly inadequate space suits, they split up and send part of the group off to “look for oxygen”.
If that isn’t a F-you mission, I don’t know what is. Although, if my memory serves, they did find some.
This thread brings back the vivid memory of watching an episode of Dr. Who from the early seventies at my grandmother’s house. (it was mid-90s when I saw it)
The Doctor is on a planet colonized by humans far in the future, and some rebel faction or other breaks into the colonists’ main stronghold. And of course, the stronghold is state-of-the art, filled with reel-to-reel computers and filing cabinets.
Apparently humankind had conquered the seemingly impossible challenges of space travel, but they just couldn’t get the hang of data processing.
Yes – and my favorite example of this is the short story “Superiority,” written by, of all people, Arthur C. Clarke.
A mighty galaxy-spanning empire is caught up in a terrible interstellar war that has raged for years. Even their miraculous invention of a torpedo that could annihilate all matter in a 5 kilometer radius hasn’t been enough to save them from the ever-advancing enemy. But there is yet hope. They had one ace up their sleeve the enemy wasn’t counting on. As their fantastic new top-secret invention to turn the tide of war, they build … the Battle Analyzer. It’s a computer … on a space ship! Imagine that! Its only problem is that it has about a million vacuum tubes, and requires a small army of field techs to replace all the tubes that keep burning out.
All the bad SciFi movies on MST3K, but especially the ones with the SUPER ALIEN TECHNOLOGY spaceships, which consist of switches and dials and gauges, which were pretty standard Earth technology at the time. Whoa! Man! Crazy futuristic!
I’ve got one…remember the movie Aliens? Remember the part where Ripley is comforting Newt, telling her that the lab they’re staying in is safe, and she points out the security camera in the corner of the room?
The camera (which is B&W, judging by the monitor display) is about as big as her head. Probably mid-sized, by 80s standards…but the movie is set in, what, 2179?
(I could go on about how said interstellar civilization has had androids with GRAPE SIZED CAMERAS FOR EYES for at least 60 years, and probably longer…but I don’t think I will. )
I guess Firefly had it right…they really do send all the low-tech crap to the people on the off-world colonies.
I could be a smart-arse and mention the original silent version of From the Earth to the Moon where the astronauts climb into a giant shell and are shot at the moon. Oh the inanity!
Actually, I don’t have a problem with big cell-phones or clunky technology in films that are made with their contemporary world in mind, it’s the films that predict the future with such wild abandon for any real speculation. (minor aside, a friend of mine hated the American Psycho film, because she said it was ‘so old! They all had big mobile phone and dressed funny!’- she completely missed that the film was a period piece to a time within living memory).
Although it’s a book, not a film, Bruce Sterling wrote a thing called, ‘Islands in the Net’ set in the future, the clunker being that the high-speed data transfer system was Fax, yes, that thing you feed paper into!!! I didn’t read a lot of the book, because it keep getting hung up on describing mundane un-future technology, but insisting it was THE FUTURE (in big, glaring, future-neon signage). And it was boring…
In Sabrina (the delightful original with Bogart, Hepburn, and Holden; not the plodding remake with Ford, Ormond, and Kinnear), Linus displays his astonishing wealth by talking on a telephone in the backseat of a limo!
I’m surprised by how many old sci-fi movies failed to predict any kind of screen at all! They’ve often got computers with perfect speech recognition and the ability to speak themselves, but there’s no visual display at all! If there is, it usually can’t show anything more than lines of a single color (green, white, or amber, take your pick) on a black background. snorlax already mentioned Westworld, and IIRC even HAL in 2001 didn’t have anything more impressive than a small, primitive black-and-white screen. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to predict that in the future we’d have “TV computers”.
Lamia: Well, it would have been expensive to make color screens just for those shots, feed them color images (which, at the time, meant taking pictures of something with a color TV camera), and make the end result look like something good on screen.
Secondly, I suppose in 2001 you could view the computer displays as being as coldly utilitarian as the humans who used them. Who needs multiple colors when a numeric readout can do the job with fewer cycles?
Yeah that’s it! Thanks, I had no idea what they were called.
When I went to University waaaay back in the mid-seventies, the physics lab had a tabletop calculator with a nixie tube display. I don’t think anybody used it, but we all played with it a bit and oohed and aahed at the antique (in 1976!) technology. At the start of the term, we were all issued a pamphlet that explained how to use it, though even back then everybody had a pocket calculator with an LED display. But I guess a few short years before that it was the pride of the physics department.
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