History Memes

Also even if you do go down the historical route, a lot of that tech is kind of a pain in the arse to recreate in this day and age. Take it from someone who's genuinely interested in this kind of thing! If you want television as it was in the UK pre-switchover for example, you basically have to rely on a bunch of SDRs and HackTV (very modern tech) to get it to actually work as a television did back in the day with the remote, channel flipping, and everything the TV actually did back then. All the equipment that did it 'for real' went into landfill in the early '10s; yes you can get a crappy little RF modulator for PAL or NTSC still but technologically speaking if you want an accurate recreation of the full feature set (ie an actual UHF PAL signal with proper VSB modulation, NICAM and teletext) this means relying on modern tools to recreate the old-fashioned signal in software. Yes you can do HDMI-VGA-composite chains or better yet HDMI-VGA-RGB but most modern equipment for this is total rubbish. It would be better to do a limited production run of CRTs with proper digital inputs, but that's a whole load of R&D nobody can really afford given the tiny market for it. The industrial capacity for it just doesn't exist any more.

It's the same thing with dial up, you absolutely could in 2026 implement a '90s style dial up ISP on a private old-school telephone network for a '90s town (if the PSTN hasn't been ripped out already like the UK, otherwise you'd have to lay new copper) but a) literally nothing is optimised for that any more, so unless you resort to ahistoric measures like MITMing all the traffic and replacing most of it with optimised versions it's going to be a colossal waste of lifeblood and b) even if you went to such lengths dial up was genuinely a pain in the arse. We adopted broadband fairly early (getting WiFi to work with Windows 98 was about as fun as you'd expect!) and it was a genuine revolution in how the internet used. It would be better to just serve the modern internet but aggressively curtail what got through on the ISP level in my opinion.