History TechnologyMarchesOn / Computers

* Poked fun at in "300MB" by Creator/NeilCicierega, a song in the 2017 "Mouth Moods" album, where the "lyrics" are audio of someone giving a sales pitch about how massive [[PunctuatedForEmphasis "Three. Hundred. Megabytes!"]] of storage capacity is.

* Creator/IsaacAsimov's ''Literature/FoundationSeries'': The first stage of Hari Seldon's plan involves publishing an encyclopedia, with updates every ''ten years'', which seems a little quaint from a post-Internet point of view. Later books in publication order catch on to the idea of TheWikiRule just before the invention of the internet.

* One of the biggest changes made in ''Series/Supergirl2015'' was [=CatCo=] Worldwide Media replacing the ''Daily Planet'' as ComicBook/JimmyOlsen and Kara Danvers' place of employment. [=CatCo=] is closer to what News Corp was than a newspaper like the ''Planet''.

* As part of its SettingUpdate for the character of Peter Parker, ''ComicBook/UltimateSpiderMan'' has him being hired by J. Jonah Jameson to run the Daily Bugle's newly launched website, rather than as a photographer.

* One of the biggest changes made in ''Series/Supergirl2015'' was [=CatCo=] Worldwide Media replacing the ''Daily Planet'' as ComicBook/JimmyOlsen and Kara Danvers' place of employment. [=CatCo=] is closer to what News Corp was than a newspaper like the ''Planet''.

* One of the biggest changes made in ''Series/Supergirl2015'' was [=CatCo=] Worldwide Media replacing the ''Daily Planet'' as ComicBook/JimmyOlson and Kara Danvers' place of employment. [=CatCo=] is closer to what News Corp was than a newspaper like the ''Planet''.

* Due in large part to its iconic status, ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'' has bent over backwards to justify the continued existance of the ''Daily Planet'' in recent decades. Back in the Golden Age through the Bronze Age, the primary reason that Clark Kent got a job there was doing so would enable him to keep abreast of any major disasters. Following the rise of the internet (along with, to a lesser extant, cable [=TV=]), this is no longer applicable.

* The 1999 revival of Series/{{Zoom}} was doomed by the rise of social media, most especially the launch of Website/YouTube, which took place the year the show was canceled. Nowadays, it and other social media sites enable the average person to put out information faster than the show's website was or could could be updated and much faster than new episodes of the show could be produced. [[note]] Due of the nature of its own production process, ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' was able to respond to current events more rapidly than Zoom before the latter even premiered. [[/note]]
** Speaking of Zoom, the the original show never would have made it in the 90s, as it relied solely on snail mail to get material suggestions from viewers.
* In ''Series/TheRockfordFiles'' 1978 episode "The House on Willis Avenue", Jim's apprentice Ritchie types Jim's name into a computer terminal and a few seconds later receives a huge amount of information about his personal life. The rest of the episode, dealing with a villain's attempt at omniscient surveillance and information gathering on ordinary citizens, is frighteningly prescient.
* In an episode of ''Series/MarriedWithChildren'' has Marcy proudly [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd97IzJbiYc list out the specs of a new, top-of-the-line 486 computer]]. To show how fast tech was changing, by the end of the episode, she described the same computer as "slow and stupid."
* The "megabyte modem" in the ''Series/DoctorWho'' serial "The Trial of a Time Lord".
** Going back to WOTAN in "The War Machines" as mentioned earlier, the Doctor is also amazed that it can quickly perform mathematical equations, a technology that would have seemed quite simple even a decade later.

* The 1999 revival of Series/{{Zoom}} was doomed by the rise of social media, most especially the launch of Website/{{Youtube}}, which took place the year the show was cancelled. Nowadays, it and other social media sites enable the average person to put out information faster than the show's website was or could could be updated and much faster than new episodes of the show could be produced. [[note]] Due of the nature of its own production process, ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' was able to respond to current events more rapidly than Zoom before the latter even premiered. [[/note]]

* In one episode of ''Series/MissionImpossible'', Barney's gadget of the week was a chess computer that could hold its own against professional chess players. Back when the episode came out in the late sixties that would have been incredible, but twenty years later chess programs could be easily purchased and run on a home computer, and thirty years later IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer genuinely did beat a grandmaster at chess. Since then, the rules of tournament chess have been updated specifically to prevent people from getting computerized support to help win a match the way Barney and Rollin did in that episode.

* Some of the jokes in {{Music/Weird Al|Yankovic}}'s song "It's All About The Pentiums" haven't aged well (Y2K, the trademark "Pentium" itself has moved from top-of-the-line [=CPUs=] to cheap bottom-shelf models, etc.), but the "Hundred Gigabytes of RAM" remains a ludicrously large amount [[note]]Not unattainable, just expensive and mostly unnecessary; only in 2019 are games that are requiring 32g of RAM coming out[[/note]], and the "Flat Screen Monitor Forty Inches Wide" is still huge. [[note]]Although most 2019-current [=TVs=] can easily display a computer's output if the computer can provide HDMI, which is most modern computers.[[/note]]
** In the Music/WeirdAlYankovic song "White and Nerdy" the nerd sings, "My Website/MySpace page is all totally pimped out/I got people begging for my top 8 spaces..." Not likely these days.

* Music/{{Everclear}}'s song "AM Radio" similarly lampshades the trope in its first verse, which is an extended explanation that things like [=VCRs=], DVD players, the Internet, and [=CD=]s didn't exist in 1970, and thus the singer had to listen to the radio and wait to hear his favorite music.

* This trope makes the Music/TomSmith song "Tech Support For Dad" funnier every year, because the whole point of the song is that the singer's dad has a computer that is hopelessly outdated and is utterly clueless as to how to maintain it. Among the cracks are a mention that the computer in question was bought before the Clinton Impeachment Trial (December 1998), still has Windows 3.1 installed (Replaced by Windows 95 in August 1995) and its owner is still using a dial-up modem (which means that downloading the necessary patches for the computer will take forever).

** To get a sense of how "behind the times" NASA is with selecting their parts, the Mars Curiosity Rover, launched in 2011, has a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750 PowerPC-750 based CPU]], 256MB of RAM, and 2GB of flash memory. This is slightly better than the original Apple [=iMac=] released in 1999. On the other hand, it's now into year 7 of its two year mission and still working. How many of your devices do you still have that are seven years old? And how many of them are likely to have still been working after being shot 350 million miles into space?

** Also, FORTRAN is still in use for scientific programming. Yes, it's old. Yes, it's kind of clunky at dealing with things like text. But for pure number-crunching, it can be orders of magnitude faster than more modern languages ... programmers have had a ''long'' time to work on the optimizers, so optimized FORTRAN code will probably be faster than even assembly language except for the most basic tasks.

* Most of the world's embedded devices (more basic than your cellphone), either uses Intel's 186 (1982), Intel's 8051 (1982) Freescale's 68MC000 (based on the Motorola 68000 from 1979), Zilog Z80 (1976), MOS 6502 (1975), and various 8-bit micro-controllers from PIC, AVR, etc. Why? Because they don't need features of a modern processor, they're simple to program, and they tend to use a lot less power (important for a sensor that needs to stay out for weeks without intervention). ARM has come out with cheap yet effective 32-bit micro-controllers, but it also comes with the complexities of such, so the 8-bit/16-bit guys will still be around for a while.

* The California Science Center in Los Angeles was originally built in 1913, and a massive expansion was done in 1998. The museum's technology exhibit seemingly hasn't been updated since that renovation -- every screen in the exhibit hall is a cathode-ray tube, the CPU on display is an ancient Pentium, the description of e-mail and the Internet is highly archaic, and no discussion of video games at all. The transportation exhibit is just as outdated; the exhibit's example of clean transportation is a fuel-cell car (touted as the future in the 1990s) instead of a more realistic electric car (the problems with fuel cell vehicles haven't been solved, and electric vehicles are much more common now). However, given the speed at which technology advances, it may be unfeasible to keep updating these two exhibits, though an update once every five years should be enough.

* DSL. While it ''was'' state-of-the-art at the TurnOfTheMillennium, because it was (and still is) faster than 56K dial-up, it has largely been superseded by true broadband Internet from a cable, satellite, or fiber provider (which is much faster). Nowadays, the only people that use DSL are people who live in very remote, rural areas, where cable and fiber Internet are not available (if they're unwilling to put up with the latency issues or pay the hefty price of satellite Internet), people from low-income households that literally can't afford to get anything faster (or else they would), and (generally older) people who use the Internet sparingly and thus don't feel a need to pay more money for broadband. That said though, this is generally zig-zagged. In some countries, a highly updated form of DSL is used in conjunction with fiber to provide decent internet speed to the home (this system, called "Fiber-to-the-curb", is common in some Western countries like Australia and parts of Europe and can deliver speeds of up to [=300Mbps=] to each household).

* Inverted, this iteration of the trope was an issue in the [[https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-xpm-2014-feb-21-la-et-ct-trouble-with-curve-lawsuit-20140221-story.html unsuccessful plagiarism lawsuit]] regarding an unproduced screenplay compared against ''Film/TroubleWithTheCurve''. The plaintiff argued that the first draft of the film's script was supposedly ''written'' and set in 1995, yet, among other oddities, had one of its baseball-scout characters keep real-time track of scores of other baseball games using his ''wireless laptop''.[[note]]Some did exist at the time, but they sure wouldn't have been in the hands of the general public, and baseball stadiums didn't even have places to connect Ethernet or POTS cables, much less [=WiFi=].[[/note]]

* 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 90s/early 2000s 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 2000s. 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.
* One thing that can be hard to explain to kids and teens nowadays is newspapers. Nowadays, breaking news is immediately dissiminated to the masses through mobile apps and websites. In fact, 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 Sands of Mars'', includes a journalist taking a commercial space flight to the colony on Mars. A journalist who uses a ''typewriter''.
** ''Into the Comet'' is even worse: A spaceship exploring a comet loses its navigational computer, and the complex orbital calculations cannot be performed by hand. ''There is not a single calculator on board''. The ingenious solution? [[spoiler:Building dozens of ''abacuses'', and implementing a production line of crew members using said devices.]]

* The rich uncle of the protagonist of Creator/FredSaberhagen's 1981 ''Octagon'' has robot servants that wash dishes and ascend staircases with ease, a robovac that's pretty much identical to the current ones, and a high-resolution holographic motion-capture system in his office. But the concept of "computer games" is still so new that the nephew can only think of their entertainment potential in comparison to golf or football, and the middle-class gamer geek whose death kicks off the story plots his play-by-mail game moves on a large plywood-backed paper map because getting an actual ''computer'' would be far too bulky and expensive.

* The early Creator/KurtVonnegut novel, ''Player Piano'', feature EPICAC, an ENIAC parody[[note]]The name is a takeoff on an old household staple OTC medicine used to induce vomiting.[[/note]] that takes up the entirety of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsbad_Caverns Carlsbad Caverns]].

* In the Creator/AEVanVogt novel ''Star Cluster'', they are even connected via antennae (radio?) to the otherwise room-sized server.

* Then there's Andrew M. Greeley's novel ''God Game'', a rather forgettable piece of fiction apart from the assertion that a computer with a 286 processor apparently can do enough calculations per second to simulate an entire world, right down to blades of grass.

* The desk computer, not ''desk top'' computer -- i.e., the computer is actually small enough that it can be fit into an executive size desk. Seen in Creator/JohnBrunner's ''The Jagged Orbit'' (1969) and many others into the 1980s. Some computers in the 1970s actually were built into office desks.
* ''The Adolescence of P-1'' by Thomas Ryan. A 1977 tale of an artificial intelligence that propagates itself by way of punch cards, acoustic coupler modems, and reel-to-reel tape spools that necessitate signaling human operators to change tapes.

* In Greg Bear's book ''The Forge Of God'', copies of the Library of Congress are purchased in CD-ROM format. They are inconveniently bulky.

* Global satellite broadcasting was [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_television#Early_milestones first used in 1962]], but a handful of years later Rene Barjavel has his Antarctic explorers relaying their discoveries to the Trio satellite to be broadcast live ''on a 24-hour news channel'' in his 1968 novel ''La Nuit des Temps'' (''The Ice People''). One executive is watching this proto-CNN on an airplane.

* In ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'', an in-universe example occurs with Quagmire believing that as of 2009, the Internet was still incredibly slow and only used solely by nerds, only to be informed that's no longer true, in addition to the ridiculous [[TheInternetIsForPorn amount of pornography]] that can be found online. When he's next seen finally venturing outside of his house several days later, he's clearly not slept, is severely dehydrated and has the [[ADateWithRosiePalms left arm of a bodybuilder]].

** An infamous example of this is in Series 2, Episode 8 - The One With the List. Chandler boasts that his new laptop has: "12 MB of RAM, 500 MB harddrive, built in spread-sheet capabilities, and a modem that transmits at over 28,000 BPS (28 kbps, or about ''3.5 [=KBps=]'', for the non-geeks out there)". Today, nobody even ''makes'' anything with specs that weak. For comparison, a reasonable computer today would be expected to have between 8 and 16 ''Gigabytes'' of RAM, 1 TB [=HDDs=] are common (even [=SSDs=] under 120GB are rare), the number of options for spreadsheet programs is bewildering, and connection speeds today are measured in ''megabits'' per second at a minimum. Considering Chandler's laptop was supposed to be top-of-the range, the equivalent today could have something like 32GB RAM (about 2600x more memory) and a 512 GB Solid-State Hard Drive (500 times bigger) with 4 TB [=HDD=] (''4000 times bigger''), and ''2.8 Gigabits'' (nearly a hundred thousand times faster) networking connections are not unusual. Even though Gigabit-speed internet is still out of reach for most people, the average speed of Internet connection is currently at least 50mbps at minimum- which is leaps and bounds beyond the 28.8kbps afforded by Chandler's laptop's modem.[[note]]To be fair tho, when that episode was filmed in 1995, the specs were glorious especially for a portable, and a 28.8kbps modem was the creme of the crop. But even then, Pentiums were already out in the market, Chandler's laptop in overall is still a 486.[[/note]]

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

** In ''The Stars, like Dust'', the hero calculates the trajectory for interstellar jumps by hand. The calculation is relatively complex to find the angle of the jump and the distance, but it's explicitly a straight-line jump across half the galaxy, and he has to work it out on paper.

** Just like the [=VLB=] ports before it going extinct due to [=PCI=], [=AGP=] ports have been made extinct by [=PCI-Express=] ports. And on the topic of [=PCI=] slots, all high-end motherboards made since 2018 have lacked [=PCI=] ports due to the increase in GPU sizes reducing the amount of slots a motherboard can offer, and [=PCI=] can now only be found on budget and specialty motherboards, although it is possible to purchase a converter riser cable if you really need it.

** You'd think SATA would be quickly be joining the list of legacy ports as an interface designed for ancient OG specification [=SSDs=] [[note]]Indeed, SATA replaced IDE in the early 2000s because the first generation SSD drives were appearing and those would ''saturate'' IDE interfaces that traditional spinning hard drives used[[/note]] as the speed of flash memory increases over the past 20 or so years. However that isn't the case. Higher end modern [=SSDs=] favor of a PCI-Express interface for bandwidth reasons, which has culminated in high-performance [=SSDs=] taking the form of [=PCIe=] expansion cards, SATA Express and M.2 slot cards. However, ''budget'' [=SSDs=] and [=SSDs=] meant for short term archival purposes (ie slower but come in sizes multiple times that of the largest capacity performance [=SSDs=]) still uses the SATA connector. This holdback is due to how expensive ultra high speed flash memory are, and many motherboards as of 2021 still has ''at least'' four SATA ports, with high-end motherboards still sporting as many as ''eight''. Justified in that many SATA SSDs can be [=RAIDed=] together to make a crazy-fast and hugely spacious drive.

* Linux and UNIX-like operating systems have lots of holdovers from as far as the early days of Dennis Ritche and Ken Thompson's Research UNIX. The physical terminals, for example, are known as ''ttyX'' because the first few text terminals were teletypes ([[=TTYs=]) -- electric typewriters connected to the system that physically printed out program output and sent key presses to the computer. The idea of putting all executables under /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin was because the third edition required four hard drives to store the entire suite of system commands. The ''dd'' command's syntax was designed to mimic that of a similar IBM mainframe command. UNIX-like operating systems that officially stick to the Single UNIX Specification such as IBM AIX and Mac OS X have their basic commands perform exactly like the old System V UNIX commands of yesteryear (unlike Linux, whose basic commands usually have much more functionality).

* Inverted, this iteration of the trope was an issue in the unsuccessful plagiarism lawsuit over ''Film/TroubleWithTheCurve''. The plaintiff argued that the first draft of the film's script was supposedly written and set in 1995, yet, among other oddities, had one of its baseball-scout characters keep real-time track of scores of other baseball games using his ''wireless laptop''.[[note]]Some did exist at the time, but they sure wouldn't have been in the hands of the general public, and baseball stadiums didn't even have places to connect Ethernet or POTS cables, much less [=WiFi=].[[/note]]

* Inverted, this iteration of the trope was an issue in the unsuccessful plagiarism lawsuit over ''Film/TroubleWithTheCurve''. The plaintiff argued that the first draft of the film's script was supposedly written and set in 1995, yet, among other oddities, had one of its baseball-scout characters keep real-time track of scores of other baseball games using his ''wireless laptop''.[[note]]Some did exist at the time, but they sure wouldn't have been in the hands of the general public, and baseball stadiums didn't even have places to connect Ethernet or POTS cables, much less WiFi.[[/note]]

** A meta-example - in Season 7, Xander has never heard someone use the phrase "Googling". That episode actually was the first televised instance of someone using that phrase.

** The strips that ended with Sabrina replacing her Amiga with an emulator also revealed she had been using Linux and Microsoft systems at work for an untold number of years as well, acting as a retroactive {{Retcon}}.

* 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.

* ''Webcomic/SabrinaOnline'' staked a lot of its early personality on the author's love of Amiga computers, the titular character Sabrina was a massive Amiga fan and her roommate Amy had even been ''used'' in various Amiga magazine articles and tech demos in Real Life during the late 1980's into the early 1990's. However by the time the webcomic itself launched in 1996, the Amiga was already looking like a dying tech brand; and the comic skirted by with WebcomicTime as a crutch to justif keeping the Amiga computers featured prominently. By the 2020's the strip finally caved that the continued Amiga use was beginning to look increasingly anachronistic; and Sabrina replaced her Amiga with a Raspberry Pi emulator card.

* ''Webcomic/SabrinaOnline'' staked a lot of its early personality on the author's love of Amiga computers, the titular character Sabrina was a massive Amiga fan and her roommate Amy had even been ''used'' in various Amiga magazine articles and tech demos in Real Life during the late 1980's into the early 1990's. However by the time the webcomic itself launched in 1996, the Amiga was already looking like a dying tech brand; and the comic skirted by with WebcomicTime as a crutch justify keeping the Amiga computers featured prominently. By the 2020's the strip finally caved that the continued Amiga use was beginning to look increasingly anachronistic; and Sabrina replaced her Amiga with a Raspberry Pi emulator card.

* In ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfKyrandia Book 3: Malcolm's Revenge'', clicking on the Fish Queen's tic-tac-toe board will cause [[DeadpanSnarker Malcolm]] to state his idea of a proper circa 1994 PC gaming system. And cordless mice still aren't that common.