History TechnologyMarchesOn / Computers

* In ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', Cordelia is easily tricked into thinking that the "DEL" button on the keyboard stands for "Delete".

[[folder: Real Life]]
* Scanners were once a must-have piece of computer hardware in the 90s and 2000s due to their ability to digitally immortalize paper photographs, as well as letting the user restore faded or damaged photos with imaging software. But with digital photography superseding old-school paper photos, scanners have declined in relevance. Nowadays they're pretty much only used in professional settings. For someone who simply wants to share an old photo of their grandparents on Instagram, it's faster and easier to just use their phone to [[ShapedLikeItself take a photo of the photo]] and crop out the background. Most smartphones today are even able to detect what you're trying to do and go into "scanner" mode which crops out the background automatically.

* The season one ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' episode "[[{{Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E8IRobotYouJane}} I Robot, You Jane]]", which was created right in the middle of the panic that online chat rooms were crawling with horrible perverts that wanted to kidnap you. Then there's the scene where Buffy doesn't quite catch on to Willow saying she met a guy online, thinking they were "on line" for something. Most amusingly, the demon Moloch ends up in a deliberately cheesy and ridiculous robot body to demonstrate how much he doesn't belong in modern times, except that it's almost impossible to pick this out from all the ''un''intentional cheesy and ridiculous stuff around it.

* Scanners were once a must-have piece of computer hardware in the 90s and early 2000s due to their ability to digitally immortalize paper photographs, as well as letting the user restore faded or damaged photos with imaging software. But with digital photography superseding old-school paper photos, scanners have declined in relevance. Nowadays they're pretty much only used in professional settings. For someone who simply wants to share an old photo of their grandparents on Instagram, it's faster and easier to just use their phone to [[ShapedLikeItself take a photo of the photo]] and crop out the background. Most smartphones today are even able to detect what you're trying to do and go into "scanner" mode which crops out the background automatically.

* In Music/DestinysChild's song "Survivor" from 2001, many people laughed at Kelly Rowland's line in the third verse, "You know I'm not gonna diss you on the internet," thinking it was just an attempt at [[TotallyRadical sounding current]]. Within ten years of the song's release, social media would come to play a huge role in everyday life, especially for celebrities, giving the line much more legitimacy than it had in 2001.

* ''Film/SchoolOfRock'': Dewey Finn's ploy could not work in a world with social media. A glance at his friend Ned's Facebook or a [=YouTube=] video of Dewey with his first band would immediately tip the school off.

* ''Literature/TheEndOfEternity'' uses punchtape, film -- which takes two meters to store a bookcase, and a molecular recorder -- sixty million words in less than a cubic inch. The last one would have been still impressive by today's standards had it been recording words as sound, but an attached transliterator is described.
** Justified in-story, as the time travel and history manipulation invoked in the book is shown to be deliberately stunting the growth of humanity, leading to endless repetition instead of advancement. However, this implied that this is the best technology that humans would ever develop.

* ''Literature/TheCavesOfSteel'' is three thousand years in the future. The first storage media mentioned? [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory Mercury delay lines]]. How many here have heard of that? The trope is further emphasized by the fact that the technology to create sentient robots with [[AppliedPhlebotinum "positronic brains"]] exists, the technology has been around since the 21st Century, and a robot with such a brain is shown ''impressed at Earth computers'' - while looking through punch cards!

* Creator/IsaacAsimov's ''Literature/FoundationsEdge'' (published [[TheEighties 1982]]) has the main characters Trevize and Pelorat carrying a very important historic library aboard spaceship ''on one disk''. This is treated as some major technological breakthrough [[TimeAbyss 15 000 years into the future]]. It wouldn't exceed the capabilites of [[UsefulNotes/CompactDisc a mid-1980s CD]].
* In Asimov's "Literature/TheMartianWay", one person complains that his partner brought along a lot of dead weight -- fifteen pounds of books. Now, maybe he meant microfilm, but today, a lot of books will be needed to fill fifteen pounds of storage medium appropriate for a Martian colony...

* In Asimov's ''The Martian Way'', one person complains that his partner brought along a lot of dead weight -- fifteen pounds of books. Now, maybe he meant microfilm, but today, a lot of books will be needed to fill fifteen pounds of storage medium appropriate for a Martian colony...

* In ''Literature/ThePendragonAdventure'', Bobby uses a 5000-6000 AD holographic computer. While we still don't have holographic computers, the use of the computer (like an encyclopedia), can be accessed today using [[Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} That Other Wiki]].

* Apple was one of the first companies to introduce a compact desktop when they introduced the G4 Cube in 2000 and the Mac Mini in 2005. A number of PC manufacturers have followed suit and introduced small form factor PCs. These small PCs have largely replaced traditional PCs - especially in business settings such as corporate desktops or point of sale systems.

* The soul classic "Wonderful World" (often [[RefrainFromAssuming misnamed as "Don't Know Much About History"]]) mentions ''slide rules'' as another thing the singer don't know much about.

* In Music/DestinysChild's song "Survivor" from 2001, many people laughed at Kelly Rowland's line in the third verse, "You know I'm not gonna diss you on the internet," thinking it was just an attempt at [[WereStillRelevantDammit sounding current]]. Within ten years of the song's release, social media would come to play a huge role in everyday life, especially for celebrities, giving the line much more legitimacy than it had in 2001.

* In one episode of ''WesternAnimation/TheTransformers'', back in the 1980's, Swindle sells his team's body parts when they are blown apart. Megatron is pissed off and tasks him with getting them back, and Swindle manages this fairly easily, with the exception of Brawl's brain. "I didn't think it would make any difference" is Swindle's excuse. Brawl's brain? It's about the size of a modern Desktop Tower. The thing is that back then it would have seemed unfeasibly complex for a computer to be that size while packing any significant power. Now, it's not quite such an impressive thought, even for that of a Cybertronian.

* PlayedForLaughs in ''Anime/HiScooolSehaGirls'': [[UsefulNotes/SegaDreamcast Dreamcast]] can access the internet, but her ability to do so is hampered by both dial-up speeds (the console she represents having been released in the late 90's) and the time of day (she gets the best speeds only when accessing the net at night).

* This is ''part'' of the reason the ending to ''Film/TradingPlaces'' wouldn't work today: all the trading is done through automated computer trading rather than in person, on the floor trading, making Winthorpe and Valentine's scheme impossible in the modern day. The other part falls under ArtisticLicenseEconomics (since there's no Economics Marches On)-[[spoiler:the insider trading that the scheme relies on ([[NotCheatingUnlessYouGetCaught which]] ''[[NotCheatingUnlessYouGetCaught wasn't]]'' [[NotCheatingUnlessYouGetCaught illegal in the 80's]]) [[ThereShouldBeALaw was made illegal in 2010]], with this movie even specifically being cited when the law was made.]]

* ''Imponderables'' was a nonfiction series by David Feldman, dedicated to answering questions people have randomly wondered about for generations. Things like, "Why do judges wear black robes?", "Why aren't there purple Christmas lights?", or "Why do does your mouth open when applying mascara?" The series ran for 20 years, releasing 11 books between 1986 and 2006. But by the mid-2000's, the internet had taken off and people could simply look up the answers to random questions they've been pondering. In fact, a five-second Google search can provide answers to the examples listed here.[[note]]Black robes were worn by judges throughout the British Empire to mourn the death of a monarch, but American judges came to view the look as symbolizing impartial justice, so the habit stuck long after Independence. Christmas lights don't normally come in purple because the color simply isn't associated with Christmas like red, green, gold, and blue. And you open your mouth while applying mascara because the nerves controlling your mouth and eyelids run close together and will "crossfire" unless you consciously close your mouth.[[/note]]

** As for processing power, the android Data is stated as being capable of 60 teraflops, or 60 trillion operations per second. In the 80's when ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' premiered, this was 60,000 times faster than the most powerful supercomputers of the day. But by the 2010's, high-end computers have already surpassed 100 teraflops... Although the hardware that's capable of doing so takes up ''considerably'' more space than whatever percentage of Data's internal volume is dedicated purely to processors, to say nothing of power and cooling requirements, so that's still impressive. The memory capacity of a hundred petabyte is still above what we have today, but not that far: Data's torso packed up with the best Micro SD cards of 2018 would just about get there.

* "Computer Love" by funk band Zapp & Roger was released in 1986 and is about falling in love with someone through a computer dating service. Since the internet wasn't commercially available in the mid-80's[[note]]computer dating services do exist by the early 80s, but in the then popular BBS form, which requires the user to dial a local number on his modem and use terminal software to perform the operations.[[/note]], the song was considered funky and ultra-modern at the time, completely in line with Roger Troutman's signature use of the digital talk box (a spiritual precursor to auto-tune). Needless to say, online dating has long become mundane and unremarkable, making the song painfully dated nowadays.

* Internet portals like America Online, Prodigy, [=CompuServe=], iMagination, etc. were called such because that was how you usually entered the Internet -- you would log into their servers to connect your computer to the internet[[note]]24-hour internet service was too inaccessible/expensive for most mainstream computer users until about 2002, so before then, such portals provided a simple way to dial into an internet server, use the internet for a bit, and then disconnect from it when finished[[/note]], and they would provide you with an all-encompassing module for News, Email, Chatrooms and Forums, etc. To say they were extremely popular in the late-90's/early-2000's would be a massive understatement. In fact, America Online was, by 1998, one of the hottest and most sought-after companies ''in the world''. You could even say they were the Facebook of their time. \\

That all changed in the 2000's. For one thing, America Online's 2000 merger with Time Warner (at the time, one of the biggest and most expensive mergers ''in history'') turned out to be a total disaster, costing [=AOL=] billions of dollars and losing them a lot of investors. Meanwhile, the rise in 24-hour broadband services like Comcast Xfinity made it no longer necessary to log into a slow, clumsy and often unreliable internet portal to use the internet. You could now simply go on your web browser of choice ''whenever you wanted'' and access your favorite content within seconds. Coinciding with the rise in 24-hour internet service was the rise in free email providers like Yahoo and Gmail, and the rise in (also free) social media platforms like Myspace and Facebook, which made the idea of paying a monthly subscription for such services completely unnecessary.[[note]]After all, having an email account tied to your internet service provider means that if you cancel your service, you lose your email[[/note]] Thus, [=AOL=]'s popularity took a massive nosedive throughout the decade, from ''25 million'' subscribers at the company's peak in 2000 to about 2 million by 2010, and the company lost nearly all of its cultural relevance. Today, internet portals are seen as restrictive "walled gardens" that went against the [[InformationWantsToBeFree open, freedom-minded ethos]] of the emerging tech culture, and America Online, once among the biggest tech companies in the world, is now barely scraping by. Their dial-up service (maintained to this day) is nowadays used [[http://time.com/3856066/aol-verizon-deal-dial-up-internet/ primarily]] by older people and those in rural areas that still lack reliable high-speed internet access.

* Scanners were once a must-have piece of computer hardware in the 90's and early 2000's due to their ability to digitally immortalize paper photographs, as well as letting the user restore faded or damaged photos with imaging software. But with digital photography superceding old-school paper photos, scanners have declined in relevance. Nowadays they're pretty much only used in professional settings. For someone who simply wants to share an old photo of their grandparents on Instagram, it's faster and easier to just use their phone to [[ShapedLikeItself take a photo of the photo]] and crop out the background. Most smartphones today are even able to detect what you're trying to do and go into "scanner" mode which crops out the background automatically.

* Internet cafes. While they were somewhat common in the late '90s to early 2000s as Wi-Fi wasn't as readily available, the idea of needing to go to a public space and pay per hour just to go on the Internet on what is basically a public terminal seems odd and outdated, at least in most developed nations where computers are relatively affordable and home internet service readily available. Unless you're geeky enough to go for, having home internet limitations, or [[GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff living in Asia]].[[note]]Basically, Internet Cafes has a niche among college students in Asia in part due to culture. Society is important in Asia and friends like to play network games together in the same room. Now, most parents would’ve saddled their teens with cheap laptops with barely any gaming capabilities for college, arguing that they can always game on the more expensive desktop PC (which is often the shared family PC) at home. Weekend LAN parties are not a thing because the PC is more than often shared and taking it out of the house will most likely earn you an earful from your dad. And of course they may not have that game at home, in a region where games can be quite expensive due to weak currency, and then there is the issue of overzealous helicopter parents not agreeing with the games’ content. And some teens would like to play a network game during lunch at college. So that’s where the Internet Cafe steps in. You and your pals can have a quick match of whatever network game you like without worrying about connectivity issues while stuffing up on food, and because you are leasing the game from the internet cafe by the hour there is no problem in getting the game. Win-win.[[/note]]

* The website for the [[http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/ libpng library]], the official library for implementing the PNG image format (which is the preferred format for Wiki/TVTropes page images), looks like something out of the '90s in terms of design, both in terms of text and images. It even still has a Yahoo! search field; Google didn't even exist back when the page was created.

* A couple of ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}}'' books published in the '90s feature flavor text made up of discussions which appear to be taking place on Website/{{Usenet}}.

* Done intentionally in the ''Literature/PastDoctorAdventures'' novel ''Blue Box'', written in 2003 as though it had been written in TheEighties. The narrator explains what ARPANET is, and adds that some computer scientists think it might double in size by the year 2000. In general, the book is very careful about writing a technothriller with (by 2003 standards) outdated technology; bulletin boards and Website/{{Usenet}} instead of discussion forums, needing physical access to systems because everything is ''not'' online, and even having to gimmick ''payphones'' to gain network access. The Doctor's computer of choice is an Apple II, and at one point a "meeting in cyberspace" scene is handled through a MultiUserDungeon.

** In the {{Novelization}} of ''Film/StarTrekIITheWrathOfKhan'' by Creator/VondaNMcIntyre, scientists Madison and March have created a videogame called Boojum Hunt; because the program is too big to store on the space station mainframe, they've stored it on the Genesis Device's computer system instead. Its size: about fifty megabytes. David is shocked, calling it "the program that swallowed Saturn".

That all changed in the 2000's. For one thing, America Online's 2000 merger with Time Warner (at the time, one of the biggest and most expensive mergers ''in history'') turned out to be a total disaster, costing [=AOL=] billions of dollars and losing them a lot of investors. Meanwhile, the rise in 24-hour broadband services like Comcast and Xfinity made it no longer necessary to log into a slow, clumsy and often unreliable internet portal to use the internet. You could now simply go on your web browser of choice ''whenever you wanted'' and access your favorite content within seconds. Coinciding with the rise in 24-hour internet service was the rise in free email providers like Yahoo and Gmail, and the rise in (also free) social media platforms like Myspace and Facebook, which made the idea of paying a monthly subscription for such services completely unnecessary.[[note]]After all, having an email account tied to your internet service provider means that if you cancel your service, you lose your email[[/note]] Thus, [=AOL=]'s popularity took a massive nosedive throughout the decade, from ''25 million'' subscribers at the company's peak in 2000 to about 2 million by 2010, and the company lost nearly all of its cultural relevance. Today, internet portals are seen as restrictive "walled gardens" that went against the [[InformationWantsToBeFree open, freedom-minded ethos]] of the emerging tech culture, and America Online, once among the biggest tech companies in the world, is now barely scraping by. Their dial-up service (maintained to this day) is nowadays used [[http://time.com/3856066/aol-verizon-deal-dial-up-internet/ primarily]] by older people and those in rural areas that still lack reliable high-speed internet access.

* In Music/DestinysChild's song "Survivor" from 2001, many people laughed at Kelly Rowland's line in the third verse, "You know I'm not gonna diss you on the internet," thinking it was just an attempt at [[WereStillRelevantDammit sounding current]]. Within ten years of the song's release, social media would come to play a huge role in everyday life, especially for celebrities, giving the line unexpected legitimacy.

* In the first edition of ''TabletopGame/{{Rifts}}'' published in 1991 and taking place about 300 years in the future, the hand-held computer listed in the equipment section is described as having a "dual drive system, 150 megabytes hard drive with 4 megabytes of Random Access Memory (RAM) and uses one inch disk." Later reprints removed specific capabilities on the computers and simply had it state that they are simply a lot better than the ones that are used currently.
** Which is actually rather strange, as Rifts is a sort of AfterTheEnd ScavengerWorld where much of the planet is struggling its way back to some semblance of technological civilization in the face of unrelenting attacks by various extra-dimensional threats, and has explicitly lost a huge amount of technology.

* In the first edition of Rifts published in 1991 and taking place about 300 years in the future, the hand-held computer listed in the equipment section is described as having a "dual drive system, 150 megabytes hard drive with 4 megabytes of Random Access Memory (RAM) and uses one inch disk." Later reprints removed specific capabilities on the computers and simply had it state that the computers in Rifts are 100 times better than the ones that are used currently (which is ''still'' bad; [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law Moore's Law]] predicts computers reaching 100 times better in just over ''13 years'').

* Most, if not all, surviving newspapers have electronic versions that they sell through third party sellers such as Barnes & Noble's Nook store or their own websites and/or apps. Both options generally offer both individual issues and monthly subscriptions.

** The Doctor is also amazed that it can quickly perform mathematical equations, a technology that would have seemed quite simple even a decade later.