What if Apple’s Siri hadn’t been developed in the 2000s, and instead came to be during the heyday of big hair, 8-bit music, and totally tubular graphic design? YouTuber Squirrel Monkey has saved us that quandary by uploading one vision of what the future-past would have looked like in a Siri parody video.
All in all, it’s a very good thing that we did not have this, uh, rendition of Siri in the ’80s. The parody envisions Siri as a floppy disc-loaded program you would have to run on your MS-DOS machine, complete with command line prompts. Everything from the graphics to the loading wait times in the video is hilariously accurate as to what the late ’80s and early ’90s computer programs were like.
If you’ve ever wondered what it would have been like to ask a smart assistant, “What is Michael Jackson’s latest album?” this is a decidedly delightful envisioning of that experience.
Whether Siri’s “voice” fits the bill though is certainly up for interpretation. As one YouTube commenter put it, “Siri sounds like she’s in a lot of pain.”
The Siri video is part of Squirrel Monkey’s series “Wonders of the World Wide Web,” which imagines other modern programs like Angry Birds and Twitter with the limitations of ’80s technology.
At more than five minutes long, the Siri parody is a longer video (but it’s nothing like the wait time would have been for Siri to search the web 30 years ago). Between laugh-out-loud moments, you’ll remember to keep things in perspective when you complain about technology today.
H/T Gizmodo