open/close all folders
Advertising
"Don't copy! Don't copy that floppy!
"
"— Don't Copy That Floppy, Well known, but very dated, PSA
Comic Strips
Hilary: DAD! YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT I JUST SAW!
...Okay, you won't believe it. But I need an old camera! Non-digital! NOW!
Ted: Well, your grandma might have one. Though we'd need to get some film. But first we'd have to select a speed, depending on light and subject. Are we talking landscape photography? Sporting event? Overcast day?...
Hilary: UGH! How did you people get ANYTHING done back in your day?!
Ted: You know what I miss about old cameras? Fotomats. I bet living inside one would be like having a house and a studio apartment at the same time.
...Okay, you won't believe it. But I need an old camera! Non-digital! NOW!
Ted: Well, your grandma might have one. Though we'd need to get some film. But first we'd have to select a speed, depending on light and subject. Are we talking landscape photography? Sporting event? Overcast day?...
Hilary: UGH! How did you people get ANYTHING done back in your day?!
Ted: You know what I miss about old cameras? Fotomats. I bet living inside one would be like having a house and a studio apartment at the same time.
— Sally Forth for July 12, 2022
Film — Live-Action
"And they probably redesigned the whole sickbay too! I know Engineers, they LOVE to change things!"
— Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Literature
394. Learn how to use the internet.
— Life's Little Instruction Book, Vol. I (The book's three volumes were released throughout The '90s, when the Internet was new to consumers.)
Live-Action TV
Help our school buy a computer!
— Sign seen in Freaks and Geeks set c.1980
Chandler: All right, check out this bad boy. 12 megabytes of ram. 500 megabyte hard drive. Built-in spreadsheet capabilities and a modem that transmits at over 28,000 b.p.s.
Phoebe: Wow! What are you gonna use it for?
Chandler: Games and stuff.
Phoebe: Wow! What are you gonna use it for?
Chandler: Games and stuff.
"My dad...when he was shown around a computer once, when he was a young man, and the guy showing him 'round very proudly said...it was in the West Country, and he proudly said...'Yes, right. This is a computer, and, erm, we...we predict that, in the future, there will probably be about eight of these.'"
— Bill Bailey, QI
Magazines
"Computers in the future may weigh less than 1.5 tons."
— Popular Mechanics magazine, 1949 note
Video Games
"The antique database server used to have all the RAM anyone would ever need: 16 whole kilobytes!"
— Monster Manuel factoid on an "ancient database server", Kingdom of Loathing
Web Animation
"Whatever happened to Laserdisc? Everything's better on Laserdisc!"
— Strong Bad, Strong Bad Email
"See, that's the trouble with the cutting edge: it's hard to stay on 'cause it's very thin, and it keeps moving as it hacks at your balls."
Webcomics
Elvis: When the cat-sitter traced the number, she realized...THE CALLS WERE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!!
Beatrix: Like...the location was turned on...? Or...? Did the caller ping off a super-close tower or something? Was the caller connected to their wi-fi? I mean, the calls could be coming from ANYWHERE.
Elvis: They heard a text-beepy sound from under the bed.
Beatrix: Like...the location was turned on...? Or...? Did the caller ping off a super-close tower or something? Was the caller connected to their wi-fi? I mean, the calls could be coming from ANYWHERE.
Elvis: They heard a text-beepy sound from under the bed.
Web Original
"What... what is this strange plastic object he's inserting into his stereo? A 'cah-sette', you say? Never heard of them."
"One huge advancement the filmmakers totally missed was the explosion of the internet at about the same time the movie came out (in fact, the only reference to the internet is the official site URL in the closing credits—which naturally uses the wrong slashes). Of course, including the internet would have invalidated the story entirely. If one can just download somebody else’s brain recordings, then there’s no need for a dealer like Lenny, and poof!—there goes the whole movie."
"Any data file of crucial importance will be padded to 1.45Mb in size."
— #99 on the Evil Overlord List, c. 1996
"As for pain skins: We would have loved to do pain skins but look at how great UT's textures look and you'll probably realize that we've already maxed-out what users' systems can handle in terms of textures. It will be a fine, fine day when every video card has texture compression and every system has 128Mb of RAM so we can double or quadruple our use of textures without slowing peoples' systems to a crawl."
"Metropolis, the City of Tomorrow, last place on the planet with phone booths."
Web Video
"Slowly, but surely, shareware turned into my last cat: it fell in the toilet and died. Not just because technology was speeding ahead at a rapid pace...
[cut to Caddy inside his car, the word TECHNOLOGY speeds by outside] Whoa, look at it go!"
[cut to Caddy inside his car, the word TECHNOLOGY speeds by outside] Whoa, look at it go!"
"Besides, don't video conferences feel futuristic and cool?" Or available on all mobile devices this day and age?
Gordon: You sound funny, like you're in a well. Are you in a well?
Gary: It's called speaker phone, get with the decade, man!
Gary: It's called speaker phone, get with the decade, man!
Western Animation
Computer: INSERT DISK. INSERT DISK.
Sprig Plantar: Anne, what the heck is a disk?
Anne Boonchuy: I don't know! I'm from another dimension, not the 90's!
Sprig Plantar: Anne, what the heck is a disk?
Anne Boonchuy: I don't know! I'm from another dimension, not the 90's!
— Amphibia: "Fort in the Road"
"Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph. (deadly silence) The ... record player? (more silence) It was before CDs. Plastic hadn't been invented yet."
— Arthur's Mr. Ratburn running afoul of this trope
"They have phones in booths now? Finally, I don't have to lug this heavy cell phone around!"
— Hermes Conrad, Futurama
"Sixty years from now, it will be a child's toy. But today, it's the most powerful weapon on Earth."
— Vandal Savage on a laptop sent back in time, Justice League
Miscellaneous
"Don't touch that dial"
"Stay tuned"
"Stay tuned"
— Two phrases once used to mean "stay on our station during the commercial break" that refer to antiquated television technology.
"This book excerpt is roughly 256 Kilobytes of text in length, and may load slowly if you have a slow modem, or not completely if you are short of memory."
"I am a sucker for 90s techno-thrillers about computers, and that I am completely powerless to resist any book that is set, quite literally, “when the information superhighway comes online” in 1998. So crack open a bottle of Zima and put on some Jewel. Because it’s 1995, and people are about to make some very, very embarrassing predictions."
