“Sorry, I got to return this video”

“Mike? I love that guy, I got him on speed dial”

“Do you have any quarters for a phone?”

“Bill Cosby really is America’s dad”

“Can I borrow that VHS?”

“Sorry, I can’t come. My favourite show is on”

“Do you know where a phone is?”

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    “Sorry, I got to return this video”

    2004 is when the Blockbuster video rental chain was at its peak (cite), and VHS was still in wide use at the time having only been surpassed by DVD rentals a year earlier. Speed dial was also still a thing then, payphones still exist today, and, although complaints were filed against Bill Cosby much earlier the public wasn’t widely aware of them until 2014.

    How about “John Kerry is the candidate who can prevent a second Bush term” ?

    • I'm_All_NEET:3@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      It’s weird how slow things really are. In 2006 you could have rented a VHS from blockbuster and gone home and upload it to YouTube.

        • Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
          01·
          2 months ago

          Nope. RCA > S-Video, HDMI, or FireWire. Any of the three would have worked at the time. And many VCRs had either HDMI, VGA, or S-Video out.

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    2 months ago

    “Hark, Alfred, the smith’s apprentice, was taken by the plague - find your goodfellows and see if any of their sons of the working age would wish gainful employment to a kind master.”

  • 💭 ᴍɪɴʏᴀᴇɴ@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I vividly remember… I was in the office and one of my coworkers comes up to me with a shit eating grin on his face - like he had something he wanted to share…

    He said, “Have you ever heard of Bitcoin?” I said, “No…” He explained (sort of) what he thought it was, but sounded more like an investment opportunity (blah blah blah) less than 10 cents per… I didn’t bite.

    Lets just say this didn’t age well for me, lmao.

    • flubba86@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      When I first read about Bitcoins, my takeaway was it was some kind of credits you could earn by using your unused use CPU cycles, but it wasn’t a sure thing, it’s a lottery, you have a chance to earn a credit (a “coin”) every few minutes, as long as you keep donating your CPU cycles. (This was before gpu mining was a thing). I tried it, and after 3 days I had earned 3 coins, but then I looked into the value, and they were only worth about 10c each. That’s less than the electricity it took to earn them. And you couldn’t spend them anywhere, except that one pizza place, where it cost a few thousand coins for a pizza. There weren’t even any exchanges to convert them to real currency if you wanted to.

      I tried to find my coins years later, (when Bitcoins got to $2000 each), but I couldn’t find the old hard drive the wallet was on.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    “Osama Bin who?” And in a similar vein, “Jihad? That’s a Dune reference, right?”

    “I’ll cash in on my Beanie Baby investment when it’s time to pay for my kid’s college tuition.”

    “The internet is just a fad.”

    “I’m so excited for the next The Matrix sequel.”

    “Two bedrooms and a walk-out basement. $300 a month rent.”

    • Enkrod@feddit.org
      1·
      2 months ago

      Hah! Not those exact words but Angela Merkel in 2007: “The Internet is new territory for all of us”.

  • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    “Can I borrow that VHS?”

    20 years ago it would have been DVDs. But even before that, we didn’t call them "VHS"es. We called them tapes, or video tapes if we wanted to distinguish from audio tapes.

    • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      2 months ago

      I ironically said that when I was working for IBM.

      They don’t actually fire, they do “performance improvement plans”.

      • NotSteve_@lemmy.ca
        1·
        2 months ago

        Ah yeah, the classic PIP’d manoever. I worked with a few good guys who got fired without cause PIP’d and let go even though their performance was fine

  • FurtiveFugitive@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 months ago

    I think a lot of these were still being said 20 years ago. People were using Netflix by mail and Redbox in the last 20 years.

    Lots of people still had brick phones by Nokia, etc which had “speed dial”. You would hold 1 for voicemail but could program 2-9 for other numbers.

    Lost season 1 premiered in 2004 and you better believe people made plans around it’s schedule to watch it.