Watch: What would Siri have been like in the 1980s? This retro video will give you an idea
‘We all talk to our computer, especially when things go wrong. But with Siri, your computer talks back!’
Home assistants like Amazon Echo, Apple’s Siri and Google Assist have become so commonplace now, it may soon be hard to imagine life without them. In the 1980s, though, nobody had even heard of such a thing.
Back then, we were using MS DOS on our personal computers and floppy disks. So what would have happened if Siri, Apple’s Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface, had been created then, just about the time its first line of Macs was rolling out?
A hilarious parody on the YouTube channel Squirrel Monkey tries to imagine just that, with a retro mock instructional video (above). “We all talk to our computer, especially when things go wrong. But with Siri, your computer talks back,” says the narrator, before divulging more information.
Siri in the 1980s would have been a floppy disk-loaded programme that would have to be run on MS DOS – and only if your hardware met the requirement of a whopping 512-kilobytes of RAM.
This video is part of Squirrel Monkey’s Wonders of the World Wide Web in which the YouTuber imagines other modern software like Snapchat, Twitter and Angry Birds being run on 1980s technology.