The year is 2551; fantasy writers have started highly romanticizing the 90s~early 2000s(much like how most fantasy novels today are written in a medieval setting)when technology was still primitive. You’re a writer who decides to cash in on this trend, but your knowledge on the era is…limited.
“Okay, so I think I want the main character to find an old audio file of a warning message left by a dead person. But their computers at the time didn’t process audio files did they?” I said to my college professor. She’s an expert on the 1990s.
“Well their computers could process audio but it took a really long time. They didn’t quite have mp3 technology perfected yet, and even then that became outdated shortly after. Maybe your character could find an old tape.”
“Tape?? Like, the sticky stuff?”
“No, no, a cassette tape. It was a little plastic block with a plastic film that had the music on it. To be truthful, we aren’t exactly certain how it worked. But the tapes had to be played in a boom box or a Walkman in order to be heard.”
“I don’t know what any of that means.”
“Well, a book box is a giant radio. It has loud speakers. The cool kids would hold them on their shoulders. Some say that was more prominent in the 1980s, but it was prevalent in the following decade as well.”
“… what’s a radio?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot this was before wifi and streaming technologies. Those didn’t really become the norm until the 2010s decade, like right before the first pandemic.” The professor took a sip of her tea. “So radio was a profound thing that was invented in the early 1900s. It’s the first technology that even remotely resembles the streaming services we have today. A radio station would broadcast a live show or recorded music, but it was all sound, no picture.”
“Okay, so my character finds a cassette tape and then has to find a radio to play it, got it.”
“Or a Walkman.”
“What’s a Walkman?”
“The first portable tape player. It was still quite large compared to what we have now, but it was relatively smaller and kids would wear them on their belt, plug their headphones in and jam to whatever was on the tape.”
“… PLUG the headphones in?”
“Oh yeah, headphones and earbuds predated the first AirPods and other Bluetooth products. They had cords that had to be physically plugged into the Walkman. This was about 50-70 years before Apple bought Microsoft and started implanting the sound chips into our heads. In fact, cordless stuff didn’t become common until after the first pandemic, and our society didn’t go completely cordless until 2150.”
“Okay, so where would my character be likely to find a cassette tape?”
“That would be hard. If it wasn’t preserved in a museum, then it would’ve had to be somewhere that was never touched. Maybe an abandoned home or someplace super haunted? But even then, the home would’ve had to have been abandoned in the ‘90s for that to work. And the tape may not have preserved well enough to hear.”
“Would it be likely my character could find the tape and boom box in the same place?”
“I suppose if you set it up that way, they could be found in the same place. Your character could even find the tape already in the boom box. They’d just have to hit the play button.”
“Did the play buttons have the sideways triangle symbol on them like they do now?”
“Yes. But it was an actual, physical plastic button that clicked when you pushed it. It’s not virtual like it is now.”
“This is such a foreign concept. Maybe I should try writing about something else.”
This was awesome, but when you said “first pandemic” I gave an involuntary shutter. (Hopefully the strategies we’ve learned will reduce the damage of the future pandemics)
And then when you said ‘Apple bought Microsoft’ I knew this was a true dystopia