Watching old movies can cause snickers based on outdated technology. Not so much on really old movies because you expect it based on knowledge or experience of that time. It's more recent films or TV shows that stand out. Like watching an episode of Miami Vice & chuckling at the outrageously large mobile phone Don Johnson uses.
A few days ago I watched the first Mission Impossible movie, made in 1996 ( I didn't realize it was that old). Tom Cruise spends a lot of time on his laptop in this movie. In doing research his character uses Usenet. This software based system has been superseded by internet forums, which don't require downloaded software. Plus you don't have to register to read posts.
Of course another reason for Usenet is that Google didn't exist in 1996. Or Wikipedia for that matter.
The other out of date technology you see in the movie is how files are kept. One plot point has Cruise, Ving Rhames & Jean Reno stealing data from the CIA involving the identities of covert agents. The data is placed on floppy discs! Mind you, a 3 1/2" floppy held 1.44 MB of data, as opposed to a CD holding 700 MB. But of course, in 1996 no computer had a CD drive. So you had to have lots of floppies.
So that's what you get when you watch a tech heavy movie from this period. Another movie I remember being out, although I never saw it was "The Net" with Sandra Bullock. I'm afraid I would probably laugh at that one.
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