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!

[pauraque]

In Alexei Panshin's 1968 novel Rite of Passage, a future spacefaring society has all its literature stored in a digital library (so far so good), but when somebody wants to read a book, the librarian prints it out on paper for them.

[dolorosa_12]

Amazing! It's really cool to see how difficult people found it to get outside their own frame of reference — particularly the notion that reading requires lots of physical media.

[hamsterwoman]

Ha, my example is similar to pauraque's, but from a more recent thing. In Babylon 5 (1990s TV show), there's a scene where a character on a space station walks up to this kiosk-type contraption, looks through the day's headlines, pushes some buttons, and selects a personalized newspaper for themselves -- which the kiosk contraption then prints off on a plastic-y sheet like a transparency (not transparent, though, but it seems to be a similar material, IIRC). When I watched it for the first time as it aired, that seemed suitably futuristic, compared to the very fixed paper newspapers. When I rewatched it with my kids c.2015, it was really funny to see how the show predicted one part of modern media -- the choice in what articles to read -- but completely missed the medium, or what infrastructure would or would not be needed to deliver that.

[pauraque]

I love this! It's like they realized paper would be out of date, but they couldn't quite get their heads around not having physical media at all.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, that's amazing! I love how unable they were (as in the example from pauraque as well) to get outside their own frame of reference — that reading would always require lots of individual bits of physical media.

[forestofglory]

Not what you are asking me about but this reminded me that the other day I downloaded a PDF of a document printed in the Ming Dynasty! I now have thousand of page of a Ming edition of the Taiping Guangji just sitting on my computer! So amazing!

[dolorosa_12]

That is very, very cool! Did they just scan the original document and make it available as a PDF?

[forestofglory]

Yeah, it's not the best quality scan and it's got an annoying watermark, but it's still perfectly readable witch is amazing to me!

[dolorosa_12]

That's still very cool!

[trepkos]

Well, Star Trek's communicators are starting to look a bit dated ... and why on earth do they have to describe what is happening to them on the planet? No body cams?

[dolorosa_12]

A perfect example!

[hunningham]

Starman Jones by Heinlein. It's one of the juveniles, and people navigate between the stars using astrogation manuals, which are these insane multivolume books with charts & tables of numbers. The novel emphasises that they are printed on very thin paper. The navigator uses these manuals and a slide-rule to pilot the starship.

In the book the ship is lost, the captain dies, someone goes mad and destroys the navigation manuals and our hero saves the day because he has an eidetic memory & has memorised the entire manual. He's also plucky.

I read this in the mid-70s and it was already very dated then. Now?

[dolorosa_12]

Heinlein is famous for this kind of thing, right? A sort of analog approach to space travel — at least that's my secondhand impression. I find it wonderful!