Memory Alpha's riot timeline:
Early in the morning of September 1st, a fight between a guard and a dim sparked a riot, wherein the ghosts led by B.C. attacked the Sanctuary guards and quickly captured the Sanctuary Processing Center as well as the rest of the district. Armed with the weapons of the overpowered guards, the ghosts took six center employees hostage, including Vin, Calvera, and Lee. They were joined by "Gabriel Bell" and Michael Webb, who acted as the voice and face of the riot while dealing with police negotiator Detective Preston.
Chris Brynner, who owned Brynner Information Systems (which operated Channel 90 on the net), was convinced by Dax to break the law and to reconnect the Processing Center after the police cut it off. Reconnected on September 2nd, many Sanctuary residents (such as Henry Garcia) were able to tell their stories of imprisonment to the outside world. As a result, the American public became aware of the great injustice that had been hidden from them and further riots broke out in Sanctuaries across the US.
Despite protests from Detective Preston, the governor of California ordered National Guardsmen to retake the Sanctuary by force on September 3rd at 0500 hours. In the melee, hundreds of Sanctuary residents were killed, including B.C. and Michael Webb. "Gabriel Bell" was shot, protecting Vin and the other hostages (all of whom remained unharmed).
I always find how current (for the time) ideas are used to shape the vision of the future. In the 90s cable was still extremely relevant but the internet wasn’t. So the idea of “channels” was mapped to it. And flat panel screens hadn’t become widely used (or even invented) as well as compute was in big gray boxes so that’s how they continued big honking computers. Even though it was supposed to be 30 years in the future from when the show was written.
You saw the same think in ToS and Star Wars too (mainly the tech difference between the OT and the prequels)
AOL was still pretty widely-used then, and it used the concept of "channels" so it wasn't too much of a stretch. I suppose the writers figured that paradigm used for the early internet would stick.
Alternatively, they were accidentally right in that the internet, streaming specifically, is looping back around to become cable TV again.
I was telling my daughter a couple of days ago about how the internet was before the web and how you had to have separate software for IRC and for MUDs and for FTP and for USENET and for Gopher and so on, and then I suddenly realized that's what it's gone back to. A different app for everything.
OMG you're right. I didn't even think of it that way. Except now it's worse because every little thing has its own pointless app rather than just things on different protocols.
The protocols used to be the point. Now folks consider that noise and variations in access and experience cause more friction than cohesion.
YouTube has "channels"
Every computer on TOS fits into room sized cabinets and has rows of blinkenlights on the front panel. This is what computers looked like when the show aired.
The blinkenlights are there to report the contents of the registers in binary code. This helps a lot when you are debugging by single-stepping the entire computer one instruction at a time. Any programmer today would think this is incredibly quaint.
The show completely missed the microcomputer revolution that was brewing in the real space program at the same time they were on the air. There was a period where Apollo Guidance Computer was consuming nearly the entire national supply of integrated circuits.
And now we have redstone torches for this.
True!
...
I still want one, though. They just look so cool.
by the time DS9 was aired, there were very informative blinkenlights on modems, and the Be (or was it Bee?) had a set of averaged ones measuring things like CPU and memory utilization.
Up to this day computers still come with one for disk IO. And it's still useful.
only if you have one disk... then the light stops being useful, because you don't know which disk is I/O'ing, and needed to debig further...
I suppose the modern equivalent would be looking at machine code with a hex editor.
Ooh. That's an interesting thought!
Maybe with an external pixel display.
Like using a keyboard :D
True, although I was already on the internet in 1995 when this came out and it was clear to me even then that the writers didn't really do their research. But yeah, for most people it was still something that said "future." The web itself had only been invented three years before. The dot-com bubble wouldn't start for another couple of years. So it was this weird in-between time where the internet (or net or information superhighway as we now no longer call it) was the hot new thing but most people really didn't know what it was.
I always think that every time I watch the original alien movies. It's this big technologically advanced ship in the distant future, and yet all the screens are still CRTs.
Part of that was a design choice of course but they tried to make it a little bit more modern in the later films.
Same with Star wars of course as well.
My headcanon between OT and PT was the galaxy was kind of in a technological recession because the Empire nationalized a some industries and hoarded the high end tech for building their massive new navy and military, kinda how resources were rationed in WW2. It's even stated in some sources that the rebellion had to use cheaper or older equipment/vessels because they weren't as well-funded