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

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 It's like they realized paper would be out of date, but they couldn't quite get their heads around not having physical media at all.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