70s and 80s scifi media frequently depict floppy disks being used well into the 22nd century and beyond, despite the fact that optical and solid state storage did exist in some form back then.
Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience with.
TV/Movie scifi is mostly the last place you'd look for bold imaginings of future technology. Star Trek had a few hits with communicators, PADDs, and touch screen controls, but generally designs are very much of their time.
It's very obvious with modern scifi where controls are usually holographic projections with cyan grids and twirly animations. After a while these designs become lazy tropes - like villains who wear chunky black leather.
Compare with something like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which is far more adventurous about possible futures.
The background problem is that the 20th century was set up for an explosion of invention by the late 19th, with Maxwell/Heaviside leading the charge and eventually leading to game changer developments like relativity and quantum theory. In math Boolean algebra fell out almost by accident from attempts to find a theory of computability which eventually led to modern computing.
These were all bedrock insights which completely changed what was possible in the physical world.
Where's the modern equivalent? There isn't one. Insights at that level more or less stopped happening after the discovery of DNA and the creation of Shannon's Information Theory.
Quantum Gravity might be the next game changer, but it also might not, and in any case it's an unknown distance away. The rest is detail work, not ground breaking transformation.
> Where's the modern equivalent? There isn't one. Insights at that level more or less stopped happening after the discovery of DNA and the creation of Shannon's Information Theory.
I think Machine Learning today is equivalent in magnitude to the other scientific breakthroughs you mentioned. I don't know if you're overlooking it because it's mainly engineering-led.
The discovery of DNA may well be the Maxwell-style foundation for the next game changer. It hasn't been a century yet, and we've just deployed the first mRNA vaccines last year...
Yes it does. Like it all not we all subconsciously associate media format with a certain era or genre. A gramophone places a story back in the early 20th century and a minidisc surely brings up memories of the late 1990s. Having a period-specific piece media show up in depictions of the future surely breaks the veil of suspended disbelief.
Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience with.