Technology Marches On: Difference between revisions

[[File:girlfloppy 4318.jpg|frame|A 21st-century kid trapped in a 20th-century family.]]

 

 

So little Timmy is watching a show from a mere 15 years ago. In one episode, the characters are all excited because of a new computer game that will be released very soon. A computer game—on CD-ROM!

Often turns a work into an [[Unintentional Period Piece]]. Can sometimes be a [[Trope Breaker]]: a change in cultural context that affects Tropes. A cousin of sorts to [[Our Graphics Will Suck in the Future]]. See [[Magic Floppy Disk]] for cases when the tech onscreen in a futuristic series was dated ''when the show was made''.

 

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{{examples}}

Nobody, ''nobody'' saw the miniaturization of computers coming (with the possible exception of [[Richard Feynman]]—who was such a physics badass that he was talking about the [[wikipedia:There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom|true possibilities of nanotechnology]] in ''1959''). Interplanetary travel will surely be easy, but desktop computers? Impossible! Netbooks? [[What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?|Are you on drugs]]? PDAs and smartphones? Whatever you're smoking, pass it over here. Handheld calculators? '''Handheld CALCULATORS?'''

 

* Averted by the original ''[[Astro Boy (manga)|Astro Boy]]'' (created in 1952 or thereabouts) which mentions an Apache scientist developing a computer small enough to fit in the palm of a man's hand sometime in the 1970s which eventually led to the development of intelligent robots. Of course it looked like a tiny version of the Univac-style computers of that era and was said to run on Nuclear power, but it was still pretty groundbreaking for its time. Portable computers also show up a handful of times during the series proper, although they're still quite primitive compared to the modern laptop.

* ''[[A.I. Love You]]'': Koube gets all excited because he finds an HDD that's one whole gigabyte. Also, he's quite clearly using 5-1/4" floppy disks, which are probably unrecognizable to anyone born after 1990. Ken Akamatsu, the series creator, commented on this five years later when the manga was re-released, well aware of how dated his earlier manga was as a result.

*** Especially bearing in mind that the ticker-tape is fed directly into a bin without ever actually being read.

*** And given that Douglas Adams himself was apparently a cutting-edge technology buff...he reputedly had the first Apple Macintosh sold in the UK.

{{quote|"The great room, which had been one of the marvels of the world [...]. No living eye would ever again see that wonderful battery of almost human Hollerith analyzers and five thousand million punched cards holding all that could be recorded on each man, woman and child on the planet."}}

** However the entire short story arguably subverts the "Marches On"-type Tropes. Don't forget how the Earth was abandoned, what the aliens found in the end, and the last line:

** But technology has been suppressed, until the "Elder Race" return. Besides, a large server farm can take up quite a bit of floor space even today.

** Yeah, it says "computers", so if you get enough computers, no matter how small each is, they can still "fill the hallowed halls."

* In the [[Weird Al]] song "White and Nerdy" the nerd sings, "My [[Myspace]] page is all totally pimped out/I got people begging for my top 8 spaces..." Not likely these days.

 

** This cannot be pointed out too many times, since it never seems to sink in: In Traveller, the "tons" used in starship designs are measures of volume, not mass. That "one ton" computer fills - including the desk it sits on and a chair for the user - about 2x2x3 metres. The really big ones run warships the size of modern aircraft carrier, or larger.

** Personal Computers in [[Traveller]] [[Played With|often]] look outwardly like today's computers. Arguably this at least is justifiable as the outward design of the systems used today is reasonably user friendly. Furthermore there are other possible designs mentioned.

 

=== Video Game ===

 

=== Music ===

** The screen issue in the song is an [[Averted Trope]] because TV companies have the same problem with TV sets as monitor manufacturers have - ''there's only so big you can make them''. The ratio to human eyes and human perception remain the same. If the price for the bigger sets went down, they would have to introduce a room-size to be their top, money-making model, and living rooms are only so big. Getting back to Weird Al, he actually lampshades this in "Frank's 2000 inch TV". (A 2000 inch TV set would be 166 feet)

* One can only assume that [[50 Cent]] was trying to make his listeners envious when he bragged his car that contains, among other things, a fax machine and a phone. For reference, this song, "High All the Time" was released in 2003.

* Lampshaded by [[Kid Rock]] in "All Summer Long" when he sings "it was 1989" and "we didn't have no Internet".

* ''Les amoureux de l'an 2000'' (Lara Fabian, 1996) tries to see [[Twenty Minutes Into The Future]], opening with the brief (and supposedly futuristic) sound of screeching dial-up modem tones before the actual music. The initial deployments of Internet as a consumer product in 1993-95 were largely dial-up (and slow), but cable companies were widely peddling broadband just before the turn of the millennium. A decade later, new laptops no longer included dial-up modems as standard equipment, as they'd outlived their usefulness as a stop-gap measure to get Internet to homes.

 

=== [[Newspaper Comics]] ===

=== Video Games ===

* Inverted (!) in the [[Hollywood Hacking]] simulator ''[[Uplink]]'', which takes place in 2010 and where ''60 Ghz'' is considered ''slow''. In [[Real Life]] late 2010 a quad-core 3 Gig is seen as solid.

** A close approximation with top-of-the-line workstation/server processors of the era: AMD's [[wikipedia:List_of_AMD_Opteron_microprocessors#Opteron_6200-series_"Interlagos"_(32_nm)|Opteron 6272]] (introduced Nov 2011) plods along at a leisurely 2.1GHz, but has sixteen cores per processor, and models support two or four socket configurations - so 2.1 X 16 X 2 = the equivalent of a single 67.2 GHz processor core - so it's in the ballpark. Then again, a pair of these chips was over $1000 when they were introduced - so the actual server to support these didn't come cheaply.

* In the third ''[[The Legend of Kyrandia|Kyrandia]]'' game, clicking on the Fish Queen's tic-tac-toe board will cause [[Deadpan Snarker|Malcolm]] to state his idea of a proper circa 1994 PC gaming system. Do we have virtual reality headgear sets yet? And cordless mice still aren't that common.

* NASA still uses old fashioned DOS systems and computer chips with a few hundred megabytes of RAM for their spacecraft. [[Reality Is Unrealistic|Huh.]]

** Any space mission has good reason to use rather primitive systems. Satellites and space probes have to operate for years, and the last maintenance most of them get is right before launch. Space is a [[Death World|really harsh place]], so the hardware has to be as [[Made of Iron|rugged as possible]]—much easier to do when a system is kept simple. Programming and testing these systems is much more straightforward, and sending equivalently shorter commands is faster, more accurate, and more reliable, especially when the distant end is millions of miles away. Upgrading the system would cost a ''lot'' (and NASA is often subject to budget cuts), mostly due to the exponentially increased time required to test every single potential problem—problems that will prove fatal out in space.

** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHRc-QMoUE4 This Video] explains about the floopy disks made in 1970s until mid-1990s were actually were still functional, even by today's standards when word out that the US military were still using such disks.

* And even some businesses. It would cost more to train the IT department (who has probably [[Sarcasm Mode|documented all issues for the past 20+ years]]) and the normal users of the program than it would to just keep the old system. Upgrading hardware doesn't tend to be an issue thanks to [[DOSBox]] and virtual machines now able to run on consumer level computers (unless you happen to need DOS to drive some ancient hardware that uses a connector that no longer exists on modern computers). But so help you if your entire system was on a PDP-8.

* In the early 1990's there were several big news stories about people who had heart attacks, strokes, etc and were saved by their online friends who called the person's home police department. The Internet is so prevalent today that while these stories can still make news, they aren't such a big deal anymore.

 

== Storage Devices ==

 

* People use floppy disks all the time in ''[[G Gundam]]''.

* ''[[A.I. Love You]]'' has the protagonist getting worked up over the prospect of having a computer with one gigabyte of storage space on the hard disk.

* Peter's floppy disc with the virus in ''[[Office Space]]''.

* ''[[Star Wars]] Episode IV: [[A New Hope]]'': As was [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] by [[Irregular Webcomic]] [http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/67.html here], "We have the ability to destroy a planet and ''tape'' is the best backup medium we have?"

* In the 1994 film ''[[Airheads]]'', Chazz and his band break into a radio station to play their demo tape on air. But the player eats their tape, which also catches fire. Panicking, they try to flee only to realize the police have shown up, and they spend the movie negotiating with the police to find Chazz's girlfriend, Kayla, who has the only other copy of their demo. Imagine how much simpler things could have been if their demo was on an iPod, or available online...

* The makers of ''[[Free Enterprise]]'', a 1998 film, were avid collectors of movies on Laserdisc, as were the film's characters. The movie includes a scene filmed on location in Los Angeles' premier Laserdisc shop, and a long-awaited Laserdisc release of ''[[Logan's Run]]'' even provides one of the movie's central metaphors. The format was already in its death throes while the movie was being made. By the time most audiences ''saw'' the film, it was quite dead, and those audiences almost certainly were watching it on... DVD. ''[[Free Enterprise]]'' also has the distinction of being one of the last films to be ''released'' in the Laserdisc format.

* In [[Tim Burton]]'s ''[[Batman Returns]]'', a big deal is made about the Batmobile having an on-board CD recorder. At the time, this seemed incredibly futuristic; now, after the rise of flash memory storage for music, it seems more pointless than anything else. Imagine the kind of Bat-Suspension the laser would [[Required Secondary Powers|need]].

* ''[[Hackers]]'', made in 1995, has many examples. First and foremost is that the main storage media is 3.5" floppies. While Dade is fiddling with Kate's brand-new laptop, she mentions that it has an internal 28.8 kbps modem (an impressive amount at the time; for an internal modem, doubly so). The tech-savvy team of hackers mostly have pagers rather than cell phones. And also, the trick of using recorded tones to spoof pay phones into accessing pay-to-call numbers was obsolete even when the movie came out.

* In the 1990 film ''[[Taking Care of Business]]'', Jim Belushi plays an escaped prisoner. At one point, in a bid to flatter some guy, he acts all impressed by the guy's IBM PC, specifically mentioning, in awestruck terms, its "''20-megabyte'' hard drive".

* ''[[Spaceballs]]'': Lord Dark Helmet and Colonel Sandurz discuss on a way to track down the heroes with instant VHS technology. Granted the film was done in 1987 and takes place in the future, but with VHS technology being discounted in 2006 and with instant video on demand sites like Hulu becoming the norm… it seems ridiculous.

** Actually, the storage device of the future was a 1 petabyte data block, which could hold 1000 terabytes. The character explaining the device that a petabyte is "where [they] start," implying that it is the equivalent of a 2GB memory drive.

*** Where can you still get a 2GB memory drive?

 

=== Live Action TV ===

* The original ''[[Star Trek]]'' references tapes as data storage. The later series, did, at least, take measures to specifically avoid this trope by inventing their own fictional unit of data storage, the quad, and avoiding giving any quad-byte ratio, in the light of data storage capabilities constantly rising quicker than people might initially predict.

** One aversion (though it might not be in a few years' time) was when they gave the storage capacity of Data's positronic brain in ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'' as "eight hundred quadrillion bits". In other words, one hundred petabytes, which is ''still'' one hundred thousand times larger than the average computer hard drive in 2011. Quite brave considering the episode was written in [[The Eighties]].

* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode ''[[Doctor Who/Recap/S18/E07 Logopolis|Logopolis]]'' the highly advanced aliens who are holding the world together with pure mathematics use bubble memory. As the Doctor puts it, "Bubble memory is non-volatile. Remove the power and the bit patterns are still retained in tiny magnetic domains in these chips!" The writer was a computer scientist and bubble memory was quite cutting edge in 1981. Nowadays, not so much. This still isn't as bad as ''[[Doctor Who/Recap/S12/E02 The Ark in Space|The Ark in Space]]'' where the entirety of human knowledge on a space station built in the 30th century is stored on ''microfilm''.

* In a 1970s episode of ''[[Columbo]]'', the murderer was a rich TV actor played by [[William Shatner]] who faked an alibi using an amazing high-tech wonder called a VCR. (He tricked an acquaintance into thinking they were watching the ballgame together at the time of the murder.) Columbo was appropriately awed when Shatner showed the VCR off to him and explained how such a device would cost about three thousand dollars. (Today you can get a DVD player for less than a hundred dollars and that's without taking inflation into account.) At the end Columbo commented that it was "very brave" of Shatner to show him the VCR, saying "you certainly like to take a chance."

* A common complaint about "obsolete computer entities we still use" is the floppy disk icon for saving. A lot of people probably don't even know what it is now.

** Funnily enough, it feels like optical disks are going this route, due to the cheapness of external hard disks and the capacity of thumb drives. When was the last time someone asked you to burn them a CD/DVD for data?

*** Inverted with [[wikipedia:Emacs|Emacs]], which uses an icon of an arrow pointing down at a ''file cabinet''.

*** Similarly, Lotus SmartSuite, last updated in 2002, uses an icon of an arrow pointing into a ''file folder''. Naturally, in its successor Symphony, Lotus has replaced that icon with... a floppy disk.

*** Databases are still represented by the tall cylinder as well, referencing the old HDD symbol.

*** Eventually, hard disks themselves will be this trope, as Solid-State Drives are making headway.

** Around the same time the leading Soviet electronics magazine, "The Radio", discussed [[Older Than They Think|recording]] {{spoiler|[[Older Than They Think|mechanical]]}} [[Older Than They Think|TV programs]] on the blank phonograph disks or celluloid tape, ''with sound''.

*** Baird made it work, the Soviets AFAIK didn't.

** In ''[[The End of Eternity]]'', everyone walks around with a decoder for punch tapes - and no one thinks to put one in a mainframe.

* [[Robert Heinlein]]'s ''[[The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress]]'' has Mike, a computer that can be programmed ''from multiple locations''!! However, when he gets glitchy, they have to call in a computer repairman (who got expensive training in microcircuitry back on Earth) who can program him at the main computer using the powerful microtools of his mechanical arm.

* [[Stanislaw Lem]]'s old fifties novel ''[[The Astronauts|Astronauci]]'' ("The Astronauts"), set in 2003, features a spaceship's computer which has no textual interface ''at all'', instead displaying all its output as wavey graphs without any numbers or words. The operators must specifically learn to read these.

 

=== Real-Life ===

The mobile phone is actually [[Older Than You Think]], though, especially in the form of a "car phone." While expensive and limited in many ways, commercially-available car phone technology dates back to the late 1940s, often with radio used to contact an operator, who then would patch the call into the regular phone system. An episode of the 1950s TV series ''[[Superman]]'' shows editor Perry White using the MTS radiotelephone in his car to call his office. The catch? The original "manual mobile" system only had enough channels for a few dozen mobile calls to be active at any one time, citywide. That became saturated very quickly, rendering this "zeroth generation" of radiotelephones pretty much useless - as one waited years to get a mobile radiotelephone, only to find lengthy waits to make a call as every channel was busy. At that point? It's quicker for Superman to find a [[Phone Booth]] handy nearby.

 

* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] on ''[[Detective Conan]]'', when Conan realizes something was amiss that a famous novelist is still writing plots that have been outmoded thanks to just about everybody and their brother having cell phones. {{spoiler|It turned out that the said novelist's brother locked him into an attic and forced him to go on writing.}}

* In the final [[Story Arc|arc]] of the ''[[Patlabor]]'' manga (written in the late '80s - early '90s, set in the late '90s - early 2000s) the bad guys {{spoiler|attack the police station where the protagonists are stationed during a hurricane to force a Griffon - Ingram match}}. To prevent anybody from interfering, they {{spoiler|blow up the bridges leading to the station and wreck any landline phones and radios they can find (including a car phone) so the protagonists can't call for help}}. Considering how common cell phones were in the early 2000s... Yeah.

=== Fan Works ===

* The fan fiction "The Prince" is an alternate retelling of the story of Jesus Christ from the New Testament set in the Midwest USA and in the present day. It was originally written in the year 2000. In this fanfic, the character Lucas has a cell phone. Back in 2000, a 13 year old in the 8th grade was unlikely to have a cell phone- so the author included this to show that Lucas was the most scientific, intellectual, and techno-savvy of all of Joshua Christopher's friends. Nowadays, this would not work so well, since many kids that age do have cell phones. Author would have to have Lucas have at least an iPad in order to show his nerdiness.

 

=== Film ===

* [[Terry Pratchett]] has pointed out that ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]'' has an odd combination of this trope and [[I Want My Jetpack]]. Exhibit A: the video phone booth early in the movie. Not only are video phones rare today, very few people use payphones today because of cell phones. One may argue that since Floyd is [[In Space]] he might need a phone booth rather than a cell phone to complete his call. However, the space station had definite hotel and airport sections, which even today would have been set up for wi-fi, at least. It's still odd that Floyd used a dedicated booth rather than use a cell phone or a laptop for a video call.

** The Wi-Fi Alliance was founded, and the initial 802.11b standard introduced, in 1999. It would've taken years after that for wireless broadband to be widespread enough to be a standard amenity in every hotel and every airport. Broadband was beginning to replace dial-up on the last mile to individual households at the turn of the millennium, but desktop PCs still outnumbered mobiles.

* In ''[[Back to The Future]] II'', Doc and Marty use walkie-talkies with ridiculously long range. Had they been to the real 2015, they could've gotten cell phones. (On the other hand, they wouldn't have gotten a lot of cell phone service in 1958.)

** Could be [[Fridge Brilliance]], if two characters surrounded by technologies beyond their experience opted to go for what's familiar when they had the chance. The two-way radios are self-contained and don't require a paid subscription in the destination era to work; there are also multiple standards and "generations" of mobile telephone, so taking one to the future may not work.

* Deliberately invoked in the ''[[Doctor Who Expanded Universe]]'' novel ''Business Unusual'', written in 1997 but set in 1989. Mel's dad sees his G1 mobile phone the size of a brick as a bit of a status symbol (he's a businessman involved with computers). The Doctor is not impressed.

* The claim the parents won't believe their children that Agatha Trunchbull gives in ''[[Matilda (film)|Matilda]]'' would fall on deaf ears since having a smartphone and internet access is common, even for primary school students.

 

* Ditto for Agent 86's [[Shoe Phone]] in ''[[Get Smart]]'', which also has a dialing disc and is portrayed as an outburst of [[Gadgeteer Genius]] awesome, but which comes across nowadays as a very goofy cell phone.

* The cast of ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'', which ran from 1997 to 2003, would have been saved from many a scrape if they'd just had cellphones. Quite a few episodes use a character being in peril and unable to contact Buffy as a plot device. This wasn't a big deal in the earlier seasons, but the show hit it big just as cellphones were starting to become mainstream, so after a few years it began to seem rather odd, especially since the cast was full of teenagers (later, young adults), the group most likely to carry a cellphone. This was lampshaded at the start of the final season (in September 2002) when Buffy gives her sister Dawn "a weapon" to help protect herself, which turns out to be a cellphone. From then on most of the cast had cellphones - although ironically, they hardly ever needed to use them, since that season also saw every single character move into Buffy's house.

* ''[[Seinfeld]]'', in addition to the above mentioned car phone, had an episode where George became frustrated with a man who was having a long conversation on a toll phone because he needed to call his girlfriend to update her on the change of plans.

** Not to mention episodes like the parking lot episode, although a classic, most of its complications just would not happen in a world where everybody has a cell phone.

* The "cutting-edge" technology seen in ''[[Miami Vice]]'' is quite funny to look at in retrospect. Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs have to pose as undercover drug dealers for the purposes of their job, and subsequently have access to all the latest tools and technology. The series establishes this early on in the third episode, with a scene shot solely to emphasize the fact that Crockett has a car phone (and the receiver looks like a giant brick).

* The idea of the swingin' bachelor's "little black book" of women to call up was referenced in many 80s and 90s sitcoms, but this has been made obsolete by cell phone "contact lists". Which leaves the 2004 film ''Little Black Book'' with something of an [[Artifact Title]] for younger viewers, as the eponymous item is a PDA, not an actual booklet.

* ''[[Star Trek]]'s'' communicators look a lot like flip-up cellphones.

* Zack in ''[[Saved by the Bell]]'' had a cellphone in [[High School]] in 1991-1992. This was/is hilariously funny, the intended joke being that this kid's such a successful [[High School Hustler]] that he's able to invest in a tool then associated with mid-to-high-level executives. Now it's the size of the thing that's the joke.

 

=== Music ===

* Sheeler & Sheeler's 1990 parody of "Convoy", "Car Phone", is doubly dated: not only does it praise a type of phone which is long since obsolete, but it describes people freely using them while driving—even to ''call the highway patrol and report a drunk driver''—without any suspicion that doing so will soon be illegal. (Then again, many of the laws banning distracted driving do contain exemptions for 1-1-2 or whatever's the local 9-1-1.)

* [[ABBA]]'s single ''[[wikipedia:Ring Ring|Ring Ring]]'' talks about waiting at home for an important phone call, a rarity today. Motorola began its experimentation with analogue cellular phones in 1973, the same year this single was released, but a mobile phone with no cord was still perceived as the stuff of ''[[Star Trek]]'' and science fiction as no commercial cellular network would exist for at least another decade.

* A few songs assume intercity traffic goes through a live operator, like ''Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)'' (Jim Croce, 1972). Good luck even ''finding'' a live operator on a discount Voice-over-IP call today.

 

 

=== Tabletop Games ===

 

 

** Pay phones and pagers are the only communication devices used by the player in ''[[Grand Theft Auto III]]'', a game set as late as 2001. While it's [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] in ''[[Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas]]'' that the main character of ''GTA III'' is implied to be [[Heroic Mime|a man of few words]], it doesn't fully explain how silent characters from both the first ''[[Grand Theft Auto Classic]]'' (set in the late 1990s) and ''Grand Theft Auto London'' (set in the 1960s) also receive calls on mobile phones or walkie-talkies. ''Grand Theft Auto Advance'' (set a year before GTA III) is a similar offender.

* ''[[L.A. Noire]]'' requires the player to call up dispatch on various phones, often using the witness or suspect's house phone without asking permission, in order to research names and information. The speed with which the clerk finds such information matches the speed of a Google search, however.

 

=== Web Original ===

* Here's another College Humor video, which actually applies to ''all'' the categories above: the [http://www.collegehumor.com/video/3052195/24-the-unaired-1994-pilot unaired 1994 pilot] of ''[[24]]''.

* The "Technology Ruins Romance" series by [[Wong Fu Productions]].

 

=== Western Animation ===

** An earlier episode had Bart given one only because he was Krusty's assistant. If the episode aired today the joke of an elementary school student answering a phone in class wouldn't be as funny.

* One of the pre-cancellation episodes of ''[[Family Guy]]'' aired in 2000 - "Brian Wallows as Peter Swallows" - has Brian singing a song to a shut-in about all the modern things she's missed over the last 40 years. One of the things he sings about is that a guy with a cel phone would make everyone think "that guy's life must rule!".

 

=== Real Life ===

** The 6th generation iPod Nano capitalizes on its small, square formfactor with a clip that accessory makers make wristbands for it so said iPod can become a watch. Not to mention there are dedicated wristwatches with cell phone functions like ''[[Dick Tracy]]'', made practical through bluetooth tech.

** It is still useful in areas where cellphones and other similar devices are prohibited.

* For the most part the actual [http://www.oldatheart.co.uk/old-phone-4.jpg telephone dial] became obsolete long before you were born, but the term 'dialing' survives.

** Rotary dial is [[Period Appropriate]] to [[The Sixties]]. The first Picturephone™ used it in 1964, as did any supposedly-futuristic mobile gadgetry in [[Get Smart]] or shows created in that era. The operator likely had access to a twelve-key console on the long-distance trunks of [[The Fifties]], but the consumer version (tones to dial local calls) simply didn't exist until the late 1960s. The later standards for cellular mobile and VoIP used out-of-band signalling which rendered the pulse-vs-tone distinction meaningless in any case.

** Nor do you hang or place the phone on a cradle anymore to disconnect - you press a button. It's still called "hanging up", though.

* Remember those strange chimes that used to be heard in department stores? Those [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq4MnSCSWEo chimes] were actually used to [http://www.groceteria.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=402 page departments] in the store (instead of using a PA system), though they are rarely used today. Sometimes those are used as [[Stock Sound Effects]], such as the "perfume department" scene in the ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]'' episode "Shanghaied".

* In 2000, the police department in Ontario, California, disciplined two of its officers for using their digital pagers to send personal text messages, some of which were sexually explicit, in violation of department policy. Since the department had obtained the messages by asking the pager company for transcripts to see (ostensibly) if the officers needed a higher character limit than the city had contracted for, the officers took the city to court, arguing their privacy rights had been violated. Ten years later, it had reached the U.S. Supreme Court, by which time no one was using digital pagers anymore. Appropriately, the court's unanimous ruling in the city's favor declined to set what might have been a precedent in its first-ever case involving privacy in personal electronic communications technology, citing the fluctuating state of the technology involved.

 

== Thrift Store Tech ==

 

* There have been a few shows set in the far future which feature static-y TVs for added colour (''[[Cowboy Bebop]],'' for example). However, since digital television is replacing all forms of analog TV, the only way you could have old-style static or bad reception on future TVs is if you intentionally put it in. Bad reception does happen on digital TV, but differently. The digital signal contains a few extra bits for error correction, so the image is initially perfect HDTV even if the signal is slightly weak. Once there are too many errors to correct, the picture abruptly starts pixellating (or is partially broken into 8 x 8 pixel macroblocks) before freezing entirely, while the sound stutters and abruptly dies in what's been called the "digital cliff effect". Before the MPEG standard was created in the 1990s, the concept of splitting an image into blocks of pixels and compressing them for broadcast in any format (antenna, dish, Internet streaming) didn't exist... so no one anticipated that, instead of static, you'd get garbled images and sound like a badly scratched, worn out DVD.

* Somewhat related to the analogue transmission idea is the ubiquity of curved CRT screens in the future. A notable example is ''2010: The Year We Made Contact'', which used small CRTs everywhere on the sets for the Discovery. (This is especially ironic as [[Stanley Kubrick]] used rear-projection to accomplish the illusion of flatscreen monitors for the same ship in ''2001: A Space Odyssey''.)

{{quote|"I don't roll down my window. Because my car wasn't made in 1997. I vsshh down my window."}}

* Similarly, the accepted icons for saving (a floppy disc) and a movie (a roll of film) are both representations of entirely obsolete technology - but likely to last longer than the memory of the media themselves!

** Even there, though, they've become uncommon enough that the few remaining [[Drive-In Theater|drive-in]] cineparks are having to either sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into converting to digital projection or go dark.

* People still use the term "dial a number" when telephones haven't used dials for decades.

* Many pictograms of telephones are also hopelessly out of date, ranging from the depiction of just the phone receiver, which looks a bit too clunky for today's standards, over the "classical" key phone with the receiver sitting on top like a torero hat, to the same design, but with a dial plate. Likewise, pictograms that tell you to switch off your cell phone can hardly keep pace with the rapidly evolving appearance of said cell phones.

** Actually, "keeping pace" with new designs would create a less identifiable icon, which defeats the purpose. A box with a small antenna and a twelve-button numeric keypad is identifiable as a mobile phone. A non-descript rectangle with rounded corners (which is the current form factor for most common mobile devices)? That could be anything... so not a good choice for a distinctive icon. The indestructible old Western Electric / Northern Electric model #500 desk telephones with the rotary dials that the telcos used to rent? One look and the viewer knows what it's supposed to represent.

* Who else here has ever talked about "taping" a show on to a hard disc, or "rewinding" a DVD?

** The "DVD rewinder" even exists as a joke appliance.<ref>It's simply a base with a powered spindle and a button turning the motor on and off.</ref>

** It's still a handy method for students to pad papers that are to be a certain number of pages long. Two spaces at the end of every sentence adds up.

* Calling solid-state storage media a "tape":

** In ''[[Cloak and Dagger (film)|Cloak and Dagger]]'' everyone calls the game cartridge with the hidden data a "tape".

* Even though ''[[Wheel of Fortune]]'' switched to an electronic puzzleboard in 1997, people still refer to the letters being "turned" as if they were still physical trilons.

* [[Bill Cosby]] has an old and hilarious routine about how he wants Polaroid to develop a way to produce a baby quickly. "Kiss your wife, wait five minutes and BOOM - there's the kid! Of course you have to dip him in the lacquer or he'll fade..."

* "Hi-fi" used to mean a stereo system, and is a bit outdated in these days of [[MP3]] players. (As a term for ''high-fidelity sound'' it is still used by people in the sound industry). This is a bit troublesome tech-wise for people having [[Fun with Palindromes]] because "If I had a hi-fi" is still a popular palindrome in books, etc.

 

*** Well, except that the real moon rockets were mostly fuel (something like 85-90% of the launch mass was fuel), couldn't get to orbit in a single stage, no matter making the whole trip in one, could make a week long trip with 3 people, and an electric go-cart capable of carrying two people. About the only thing Hergé actually got right was that the thing was a tail-sitter.

* The original (circa 1980) edition of ''[[Fudge|Superfudge]]'' had Peter asking for and receiving a pocket calculator for Christmas. Later editions change the gift to a check from Grandma since, by about 2000, a regular calculator was a standard school supply and could be bought for about a dollar. He asks for a stereo in the original, but only in jest. Current editions have him ask instead for a laptop and mp3 player, and by 2010, it's hard to tell whether the latter was supposed to be an outrageous request.

* The protagonists in Ken Grimwood's ''[[Replay]]'' are stuck in a 25-year [[Groundhog Day Loop]] from 1963 to 1988, so it isn't surprising this pops up. The author had [[Shown Their Work|shown his work]] though, by pointing out that some devices could be procured before they caught on with the public (though they were expensive) there were appearances of the [http://www.wang1200.org/ Wang 1200] and [[wikipedia:1chr(22) type C videotape|Sony VTR]]. The following quote happens in 1974:

{{quote|"Near the window was a large desk stacked with books and notebooks, and in the center of it sat a bulky, greenish-gray device that incorporated a video screen, a keyboard, and a printer. He frowned quizzically at it. What was she doing with a home computer so early? ... 'It's not a computer,' Pamela said. 'Wang 1200 word processor, one of the first. No disk drive, just cassettes, but still beats a typewriter. Want a beer?'"}}

 

* When a factual show requires background music to suddenly end for humorous purposes, nine times out of ten they'll ''still'' put on [[Record Needle Scratch|the sound effect of a needle skating across a vinyl record.]] This even applies to kids' shows, where it is otherwise assumed that the audience won't have a clue what vinyl records are and need it explained every time they're mentioned.

* In the pilot of ''[[Lois and Clark]]'', the Kents' use of a fax machine was presented as evidence they weren't subject to the old-time "American Gothic" farmer stereotypes. Now it has the opposite effect of making them seem out-of-date.

* ''[[Rescue 911]]'' again.

** You can see people playing Nintendo entertainment systems and Sega Geneses in some of the reenactments.

** The lightning in "Lightning Lads" is definitely [[Special Effect Failure]] today.

** The change is not as much technological as societal; back in the 80s most universities didn't allow small appliances of any kind in their dorms. It would have been as bizarre as bringing in a washing machine.

* The 23rd century circuitry of [[Star Trek: The Original Series|the Enterprise]] included circuit boards with common resistors and diodes [http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x24hd/thissideofparadisehd647.jpg and whatnot]. These could also be found in the [http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x08hd/imuddhd0155.jpg circuity] of an ''android from the Andromeda Galaxy'' they encountered, which was [http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x08hd/imuddhd0158.jpg corrected] in the remastered version.

 

=== Music ===

* Weird Al's first popular music polka medley was released in 1984 and titled "Polkas on 45", referring to 45 rpm record singles. At the time it was a bit of a joke - polkas were from an era ''long'' before 45's. Now that 45's have been out of mainline production for almost a quarter century, ''both'' are considered quaint now, taking away from the original intention.

** In a classic case of the [[Weird Al Effect]], the title is also referencing the medley single "Stars on 45", which was a big US hit in 1981.

 

=== Toys ===

* A ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'' episode falls into this at the same time that it uses it to its advantage: the heroes receive a tape from Faye's past, but it's a Betamax, which are all the harder to find in the late 21st century. However, the electronics archive they break into features a display of various players, the most recent of which is a DVD player.

 

* One ''Abelard Snazz'' story written in the mid-80s has the titular character reintroduce gods to a super-advanced civilisation, with new and updated portfolios. Ares, for example, goes from the god of war to god of the ultimate in ultra-modern competition - ''[[Space Invaders]]'' arcade cabinets.

 

** It was also a story arc on, of all things, ''[[Days of Our Lives]]'' around the time of ''VR Troopers.'' Of course, ''Days'' and ''Troopers'' were by no means alone. Even ''[[Murder, She Wrote]]'' got in on the craze, with one of Jessica's books being adapted into a VR videogame.

** VR is beginning to make a comeback in the late-2010s, now that the headsets are smaller and have decent video resolution.

* ''[[Titus]]'' features a few episodes that reference the changes in technology at the time (2000-2002). A rich nerd was using a corded headset for his cell phone, which produced jokes that wouldn't be too out of date in today's Bluetooth world. Another episode mentioned the preference of the new DVDs over VHS.

* In 1995, ''[[World News Now]]'' became the first news show to stream an hour live on the internet. On the September 22, 2009 broadcast, the program became the first network overnight newscast to broadcast in high definition.

 

=== Theater ===

 

=== Theme Parks ===

* The Carousel of Progress in [[Disney Theme Parks|Walt Disney World]] essentially has Tech Marches On as its plot, and it's used as a source of humor in the scenes that take place in the past.

 

* [http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=10506 What Was Popular Mechanics Thinking?]

* A particularly bizarre example comes from the pages of ''PC Zone'' when DVDs were just coming out. The columnist 'Mr. Cursor' maintained that if audio compact discs ended up being called 'CDs' for short, the 'Digital Video Disc' would inevitably become known as... the 'VD'. Given that 'Mr. Cursor' could alternate between [[Deadpan Snarker]] and [[Cloudcuckoolander]] several times ''in the space of one page'' (a trait shared by most of ''PC Zone's'' staff in [[Golden Age|those days]]), it's hard to tell if he was actually joking. Of course, VDs are now more commonly referred to as STDs, making that example doubly dated.

** The idea was that this technology would have utilized the newly developed holographic memory. However, it was a lot cheaper to instead develop a system that could utilize a lot of the same factory parts as the DVD player, and the materials were a lot cheaper, as well. Due to these factors holographic memory is mainly used for backup data storage for large companies, and isn't incredibly prevalent even there.

** Speaking of [[Blu-Ray]], anything that references [[HD DVD]] is now as laughed at as Beta cassettes were during the age of VHS.

* Cloud Computing, when it was first proposed, was supposed to eliminate the need for hard drives and PCs as we know them, now it's generally accepted that even with a broad bandwidth it's a good idea to have a hard drive for local storage.

** An important question is why anyone (with technical knowledge, at least) fell for the idea of cloud computing eliminating the need for media in workstations. We already had techniques to do this (like the bootp protocol, which will allow a media-free PC to boot over a network from a server, and transparent network files systems access from workstations) and they never caught on for general use, even in environments where no local storage is ever used for data. You just lose too much performance and spend too much providing local bandwidth for it to be feasible for a large installation.

** However, cloud computing in the sense that an online server is doing the heavy lifting, is kind-of-sort-of catching on... with video games. Services like OnLive and Gaikai offers computer users of modest specs to play the latest games. The only problem is that it requires a reliable broadband connection. And it's even worse when the ISP has a bandwidth cap (major ISP companies like Comcast and AT&T have a 250gb bandwidth cap. Smaller ones don't have such caps... yet.)

* [[Played For Laughs]] in ''[[Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal]]''. [http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4097 Look] what stem cell research can do to Tooth Fairies' business.

 

 

=== Comic Books ===

* In ''[[Superman]]'s Girl Friend, [[Lois Lane]]'' Issue 29 Lois confirms her suspicions that some crooks pretending to be reporters are frauds by using the name Qwert Yuiop, as any reporter should recognize the first row of a typewriter. Now ''anyone'' should recognize this name as the first row of a keyboard.

 

 

* One episode of the original ''[[Charlie's Angels]]'' in the first season where one of those newfangled microwave oven gadgets shows up, with a man heating up a pizza for one of the angels.

* The episode "Dagger Island" of ''[[The Adventures of Superman]]'', from the 1950s, has the characters joke that a cab driver who got a million dollars will buy himself an ''air-conditioned cab''. This was just before air conditioning became common in cars.

 

=== [[Real Life]] ===

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:New Media Tropes]]

[[Category:Meta Concepts]]

[[Category:Tropes March On]]

[[Category:Time Marches On]]