Clever Geek Handbook

Matrix: 20 years later





This year, science fiction fans celebrate the 20th anniversary of the premiere of the Matrix trilogy. By the way, did you know that you saw the film in the USA in March, and it reached us only in October 1999? A lot has been written and said on the theme of “Easter eggs” laid inside. It was interesting for me to compare what was shown in the film with what surrounds us every day, or, on the contrary, no longer surrounds us.



Corded Phones



Have you picked up a wired telephone for a long time? In the Matrix, these gizmos appear with enviable regularity. Along with telephone boxes. It’s possible to joke, of course, that earlier the communication cable was pulled to the phone, and now it’s 220 volt wire, but still, disk and push-button landline phones over the past 20 years went to the same place as faxes, teletypes and long-distance calls. Remember, there were those in the USSR?







CD



Oh yeah! It's time to feel old. The film is full of scenes with CDs. When was the last time you saw these shiny gizmos on store shelves? In fact, if you regularly travel along federal highways, along the roads you can still see stalls with strategic reserves of 100% hit or Romantic collection discs. Greatest hits "and more. But in the cities it has become a real exotic. Only VHS is deeper.







Huge CRT Monitors



The age of pot-bellied computer monitors was short. In my opinion, for 5-7 years, LCD monitors replaced them, and then came the era of all kinds of “tablets” and “plasmas”. Now this is generally a real "zoo" of shapes and sizes.







Nokia



No jokes, but it seemed that Nokia was forever. Alas, the triumph of the Finnish company was as enchanting as its "doom." You can say as much as you like that the brand is “livelier than all living ones,” but remember what Nokia was in your pocket in 1999-2002 and to what microscopic size the number of users of phones of this brand has decreased to this day.







"Yellow Pages"



When was the last time you picked up these thick paper collections of telephone numbers with addresses? I think I saw them about ten years ago. And you?







With what appeared during this time, everything is much simpler. Let's go over the most notable phenomena.



iPhone



Of course, the iPhone! The past decade and a half is the cult of Apple. Of course, I can exaggerate, but such veneration of the "apple technique" during the "Matrix", as it seems to me, was not.







Facebook, YouTube, Instagram



You probably know that Facebook was not the first social network. He appeared a year later than MySpace, in 2004. But Mark Zuckerberg managed to turn his brainchild into a global monster, which entangled the whole world with its nets. You already know everything about YouTube and Instagram.







Uber



This is not just a taxi service. With its advent, the world has moved to a business model of co-consumption. To the approach in which you can be the largest taxi service, without actually having a fleet of vehicles, providing services without having a license for a carrier. Uber became the new Xerox, giving life to the total removal of everything and everything.







Tesla



If you look at all kinds of science fiction films, electric cars appear there with enviable regularity. However, it was Ilon Mask who managed to make them truly massive for ordinary people. Today, no one is particularly surprised at the appearance of Tesla or another electric car on the MKAD. It has become commonplace, like snow, rain or other weather events.







And now about what was in the “Matrix” and thank God, until it happened to us in reality. Short list of "horror stories":





I suggest discussing in the comments what other things and phenomena have disappeared from our daily lives over the past twenty years. By the way, if it is interesting, I’m ready in subsequent articles to analyze the software with which the authors made the film itself and key special effects. Over the past two decades, technology has jumped by leaps and bounds, the more interesting it is to find out how the guys (now Wachowski girls) managed to cope with key scenes.









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