Found this golden oldie in an antique shop. Classic format, old technology, and a 24 year old movie reference!

The Picard Maneuver@startrek.website to Antique Memes Roadshow@lemmy.world – 556 points –

I can't believe The Matrix is 24 years old now...

27

I bought myself a surplus pay phone to make sure I could always exit the Matrix. They aren't that expensive these days! Buy they are a bit of a PITA to get working.

Doesn't have to be a pay phone. It just has to be corded

What if I plug a charger into my phone? Or does it need to be connected to a RJ11 phone line?

I'm pretty sure it has to be a corded landline by canon

This is especially bad because there are now many countries that ended up never really building out a POTS landline network.

At some point the United States is going to decide to just stop maintaining theirs.

Cinema peaked in 1999

Civilization peaked in 1999

US Pop culture peaked in 1999-2001. Peak box office attendance and peak TV viewership occurred around that time.

Agent Smith agrees with you.

"The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about."

I owned a computer store for a few years... I'd also owned several vending machines for several years before that including one that I operated in the aforementioned computer store.

It seemed like a great idea to me that I should buy a payphone and hook it up in or just outside of the computer store .. I never actually did it though ..

It was also a terrible fucking idea... I really thought it could work though.

The Matrix was designed around a specific period of time. I imagine the machines just deleted most references to new technology being invented and kept it at turn of the millennium.

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization."

"Suffering and misery? So why not design it around the 2010-2020s?"

"That was also tried, but was similarly rejected for having too much suffering and misery. Nobody believed it was real."