Recalling the state of Technology in 1998

I've been on the internet in one form or another since 1995, when I first had a university account. The way technology and the internet were portrayed, given that it was a rural setting, in 1998 seems rather questionable. Firstly, almost everyone at home, was still on dialup internet then. A very few people had ISDN, and ISDN was very expensive - and confined to not even every city dweller - most certainly out of the reach of a rural farming based household - for at least many years...

Also the typical retail processors then, were the early Pentiums, which were no way capable of running any webcam effectively, so the depiction of an early webcam seems rather inaccurate too. Albeit a game like Doom would have run pretty smoothly on most home PC's back then. Still, for the most immersive gaming experience, in the mid to late 90's, most people would've more likely used something like a Sega Megadrive, the first Playstations or a SNES, as opposed to a PC. Those appearing on hotornot.com (a very popular site in its time) were far more likely to have used a scanned picture of themselves, until webcams became more widespread.

What's more it was very unlikely that 24/7 internet (as was seemingly depicted on 'The Contract') was available to any rural communities much before 2002, never mind 1998!

OTOH the contributors all seemed believable, even if what Eric in particular actually said, required an extreme amount of open-mindedness. Judging from the other comments on this board, it looks like most certainly do not give him the benefit of any doubt. But my main issues are with the way technology was portrayed back then, given that it was in a supposedly rural setting. It doesn't surprise me though, that so many people had difficulty accepting what was said in this episode, as it certainly required a complete suspension of any scepticism, to enjoy it.




Sandwiched between The Principle of Mediocrity & Rare Earth Theory, you should see The Fermi Paradox