The little things...

When Stanley Kubrick was working on the set design of 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of his driving concerns was that the film not look "dated" to audiences in only ten or twenty years. Hence, by way of flat panes of frosted glass carefully rear-projected with custom graphics slides, all the "computers" on the space station and the Discovery appear as flat-screen color monitors, a technology which did not even exist at the time the movie was filmed and which didn't become common until about the turn of the millennium (fittingly). By contrast, the star-spanning Empire that can build world-destroying artificial moonlets is stuck with dinky monochrome CRTs...
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