Johnny Mnemonic set in 2021

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Near-future scifi films should just give up on including dates... The future they envision rarely ever comes to pass by the time the calendar catches up to the movie. No hoverboards, no replicants, no cybernetic dolphin hackers, etc... :p

Ah, I do remember data storage in the 90s though. My first hard drive had 20 MB and was marketed as being more data storage space than I'd ever need... A year later and I was constantly having to make space to install new games. Every year HD capacities seemed to double or triple, not to mention all the other advances in technology. I was buying a completely new computer every other year for a while...
 
I can't agree. I feel like those dates are important. They add charm to old sci-fi movies. Also if you think about it Johnny Mnemonic is now retro-futuristic. :D
Now, some things evolved past the bravest expectations, like data capacity. But computational power, cybernetics and artificial intelligence is still beyond our reach.
 
Did anybody realise that the movie Johnny Mnemonic (big Cyberpunk influence/genre piece) is set in January 2021 (this year)?
Didn't watch the movie, but I liked the book very much. Regarding futuristic takes in possible scenarios, I still believe nothing compares to Huxley's Brave New World - and that book was written in 1931. I deem it a mandatory read to anybody who can get their hands on a copy.
 
Did anybody realise that the movie Johnny Mnemonic (big Cyberpunk influence/genre piece) is set in January 2021 (this year)?

Only noticed coz I decided to watch it tonight. Made me chuckle that 320GB is considered an astronomical amount of data 😆 I can fit that on an inexpensive thumb drive now.
It is kind of crazy! Not sure if the numbers come from Gibson's or if they were added for the film. The short story was written in 1981 at the same time an ibm xt had a 10mb hard drive, a double sided 5 1/4" floppy held 320kb so if you're writing about an unimaginable amount of data being carried inside your head in 40 years time......320gb would have sounded like a lot.

Also meant people had to write tight code
 
Considering it was released in 1995 therefore produced earlier than that I guess that yeah 320GB of data were pretty amazing, the equivalent of some hundreds of terabytes for today standards ;) In those days people (and the writer of this comment) used to share data across floppies and you know, each floppy of 1.44MB could even contain multiple documents, a lot of midi songs and maybe some images haha.
 
Considering it was released in 1995 therefore produced earlier than that I guess that yeah 320GB of data were pretty amazing, the equivalent of some hundreds of terabytes for today standards ;) In those days people (and the writer of this comment) used to share data across floppies and you know, each floppy of 1.44MB could even contain multiple documents, a lot of midi songs and maybe some images haha.
By '95 we also had Jazz/ zip drives at 100MB and CD-Rom at 700MB but yeah 320GB was still a lot of data. I seem to remember that Descent (IMHO the best game from 95) was on five 3.5" floppys

I used to take 2 discs to school one for "work" and one for swapping games
 
Well, yes. I'm old enough that my first computer did not have a disk drive as standard. My Acorn Electron (and then BBC Master, and then Commodore 64) loaded software from tape cassette. I did later get a C64 with a disk drive. At the time in '95 I'd have agreed that 320GB was astronomical.

It's just interesting and kind of amusing that now we are actually in 2021, it's a quite pedestrian amount of data. It's well within the reach of common consumer-grade storage products, and such products are tiny. The device Johnny uses to upgrade and "double his capacity" is bigger than an actual HDD, and if we compare with NVMe drives, it's gigantic.
 
My first memories of data transfer involved sitting in front of the TV with my brother's spectrum hooked up to an old Sanyo tape player watching a blue and yellow flashing screen for what felt like eons with my fingers firmly crossed, hoping it would load and I would be able to play "Tornado low level".
I also have a later emotional scar from the telling off I got for laughing at my mum on the phone to a colleague who was going to post her a document on disc because she said to "Make sure it's floppy because I don't have a stiffy slot"

Anyway, 320GB is an immense volume of information but you're right somehow it gets lost on us nowadays because of how capable and complex the machines and programs were using are. Especially when it's transferred so quickly and contained on a micro sd card the size of my pinky nail.
 
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Hold on. Does anybody remember that in the movie Johnny is able to upload more data than his actual storage capacity can take? :D
 
Hold on. Does anybody remember that in the movie Johnny is able to upload more data than his actual storage capacity can take? :D
Yes, at the cost of the data in his head 'leaking' in such a way that it would imminently kill him.

Now which project, also starring Keanu Reeves, has a similar central plot device to this? I can't quite put my finger on it ;):LOL:
 
The date was added by the film makers, All of Gibson's Sprawl stuff takes place an indeterminate amount of time in the future, possibly hundreds of years.
 
Did anybody realise that the movie Johnny Mnemonic (big Cyberpunk influence/genre piece) is set in January 2021 (this year)?

Only noticed coz I decided to watch it tonight. Made me chuckle that 320GB is considered an astronomical amount of data 😆 I can fit that on an inexpensive thumb drive now.
Eh, a 320 GB storage device that seamlessly integrates with the human brain and likely powered by the body's biochemistry is a reasonable prediction. An inexpensive thumb drive today is absolutely terrible for data transfer speeds. Yeah, you can get a an 18 TB SATA drive today, but you will not see one in solid-state that slots into an m.2. Typical m.2 SSDs are in the 1 - 2 TB range. I could imagine wetware drive capacity would also be limited..
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Hold on. Does anybody remember that in the movie Johnny is able to upload more data than his actual storage capacity can take? :D
Yeah. A software doubler. This was a common way of extending storage capacity back in the 90s.
 
One of my favorite film of all !
I saw it again after playing Cyberpunk 2077.
Strange days is also one of the cyberpunk films i like and fit to the univers.
Nevermind if those film became old, they are awesome !
 
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