AmyN wrote:
You know, considering that the L+C world has a man that can fly, clones, time travel, etc., it doesn't seem too off-base for the auto-attendant to have been invented a little earlier.
Carol said:
To follow up with Amy's comment - they had a space station with colonists and everything in 93. Surely they had the annoying automated crap before they had that kind of space technology...
AmyN and Carol may be right, of course, but there are other possibilities as well. Remember that LnC is a fantasy where fantastic elements have been grafted onto a very 1990s United States of America. We can assume that this 1990s fantasy world has all kinds of twenty-first century technology, but it isn't self-evident that it must be like that.
In the 1950s Isaac Asimov wrote his
Foundation trilogy. In the world he created people have invented fantastic spaceships that zip this way and that faster than light all across the galaxy. But guess what? They don't have computers. Those same people who can travel faster than light all over the galaxy don't have computers, so they are forced to use blackboards when they calculate. Why don't the people in Asimov's trilogy have computers? Silly question. Because Asimov himself couldn't imagine computers. He could imagine faster-than-light spaceships, but not computers, so his heroes had to use ultra-large blackboards and pieces of chalk to work through their incredibly convoluted calculations.
To me, Asimov's trilogy is really a space fantasy grafted onto a 1950s world, with the specific limitations of a 1950s world, such as the non-existence of computers (or at least the non-existence of computers that were any good). I think it is reasonable to think of LnC as a superhero fantasy grafted onto a 1990s world, with the specific limitations of a 1990s world compared with a 21st century one. And that's why Lois and Clark, and Lex Luthor for that matter, may not necessarily have all the things that we take for granted today. And that may be true even if the world they live in has space colonists and clones that can be grown to adulthood in a day.
On the other hand, ML, there is nothing wrong about choosing the option that AmyN and Carol suggested!
Ann