I did a line by line “does this hold up” on this song, and I found lines fall into one of three camps:
It occasionally hits moments where it’s still modern, like “Play me online? Well you know that I’ll beat you, if I ever meet you I’l Ctrl-Alt-Delete you.” is comprehensible today. And I don’t think "I believe yours says “Etch-A-Sketch on the side.” is timeless.
Then you get the completely antiquated, liek “I’m strictly plug-and-play. I ain’t afraid of Y2K.” and “I’ve got a T1 line to my house” which are now hopelessly outdated. Hell even the term “Pentium,” it was once Intel’s flagship branding, by the end it was their badge for “next to shittiest” and then entirely discontinued.
And then sometimes it gets into "this would have been impossible in 1998 but kind of par for the course today, such as “I’ve got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM” or “I’ve got a flatscreen monitor 40 inches wide.” In 1998 I don’t think there was any PC hardware on the market that could address more than 4GB, and 256 or 512MB was power user level. Fast forward to 2025, the PC I’m typing this on can support at least 128 if not 256GB of RAM (4 slots of DDR-5) not counting any VRAM built into the GPU. I have 32GB installed, but it would be relatively trivial to up it to 128GB. As for monitors, yes in 1998 the question would be “Where did you get a monitor that big? Who made it?” It’s trivially easy these days to find a 4k flatscreen television 40 inches or bigger that will work “fine” as a computer monitor and you can get bespoke computer monitors that are that big; hell some of the ultra ultrawide monitors out there probably exceed 40 inches in width. Though I think a modern power user would brag about having multiple monitors rather than a single large one. Also, CRTs are no longer commercially produced so we don’t feel the need to specify “flat screen” anymore.
I did a line by line “does this hold up” on this song, and I found lines fall into one of three camps:
It occasionally hits moments where it’s still modern, like “Play me online? Well you know that I’ll beat you, if I ever meet you I’l Ctrl-Alt-Delete you.” is comprehensible today. And I don’t think "I believe yours says “Etch-A-Sketch on the side.” is timeless.
Then you get the completely antiquated, liek “I’m strictly plug-and-play. I ain’t afraid of Y2K.” and “I’ve got a T1 line to my house” which are now hopelessly outdated. Hell even the term “Pentium,” it was once Intel’s flagship branding, by the end it was their badge for “next to shittiest” and then entirely discontinued.
And then sometimes it gets into "this would have been impossible in 1998 but kind of par for the course today, such as “I’ve got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM” or “I’ve got a flatscreen monitor 40 inches wide.” In 1998 I don’t think there was any PC hardware on the market that could address more than 4GB, and 256 or 512MB was power user level. Fast forward to 2025, the PC I’m typing this on can support at least 128 if not 256GB of RAM (4 slots of DDR-5) not counting any VRAM built into the GPU. I have 32GB installed, but it would be relatively trivial to up it to 128GB. As for monitors, yes in 1998 the question would be “Where did you get a monitor that big? Who made it?” It’s trivially easy these days to find a 4k flatscreen television 40 inches or bigger that will work “fine” as a computer monitor and you can get bespoke computer monitors that are that big; hell some of the ultra ultrawide monitors out there probably exceed 40 inches in width. Though I think a modern power user would brag about having multiple monitors rather than a single large one. Also, CRTs are no longer commercially produced so we don’t feel the need to specify “flat screen” anymore.