Friday open thread: 'futuristic' tech of the past

[dolorosa_12]

It's a public holiday, and the better part of a four-day weekend stretches blissfully ahead of me. I'm not in Cambridge at work, and therefore I'm able to pick up these Friday open threads again. Today's prompt is inspired by all the post-apocalyptic science fiction I've been reading recently (about which more in a later post). And the question is:

What is your favourite example of technology of the future that you've encountered in a science fiction novel/film/TV series/etc, and which seemed ridiculously dated by the time you'd encountered it.

Mine is an example which warms my librarian heart, from Victor Kelleher's The Beast of Heaven. This is a novel set in the distant future after a nuclear apocalypse has wiped out almost all life on Earth. The remaining people keep (an imperfect) knowledge of past human civilisation alive due to the fact that one person takes on a semi-sacerdotal role (part priest, part keeper of history and lore, part bardic reciter of this history and lore) due to being trained in the ability to read. And where are these surviving historical records to be found? In the advanced, ubiquitous, certain-to-survive-nuclear-apocalypse format of ... microfilm!

I find this delightful. It was already charmingly retro when I first read the book for my secondary school English class in 1999, and it's even more so with every year.

What about you?

Comments

[lirazel]

I love this but also I find it pretty realistic in the sense that if you could figure out a way to make sure it lasted for a very long time, microfilm is a good choice! You only need light and magnification to access it, which would be pretty easy to recreate, as opposed to, like, trying to re-invent a DVD player from scratch! So good thought, Mr. Kelleher!

I will have to ponder the question and see if something comes to mind!

(Also: yay four-day weekend!!!)

[dolorosa_12]

Oh yes, from a purely preservation perspective (this is such a librarian-archivist conversation!), microfilm makes sense, and was a clearly thought-out authorial decision on Kelleher's part. But from the perspective of being a commonly and currently used format, something with which most people are familiar, and know how to access, it doesn't work at all. The book was published in the 1980s, and, as I say, even by the time I came to it in the 1990s, microfilm was a pretty niche format.

Yay four-day weekend indeed! I really needed it.

[lirazel]

But from the perspective of being a commonly and currently used format, something with which most people are familiar, and know how to access, it doesn't work at all. The book was published in the 1980s, and, as I say, even by the time I came to it in the 1990s, microfilm was a pretty niche format.

Oh yes, definitely! I just like the unexpectedness of something we think of as being obsolete actually being more likely to be useful in the future!

[corvidology]

It basically turns into unusable vinegar smelling semi-goo after a number of years though no matter how well you store it.

[lirazel]

Oh yes, I'm familiar! But if you could figure out a way to do it that preserved it, it would be accessible in a way that digital stuff just isn't!