Season 4 of “For All Mankind” just started on Apple TV.

I imagine the venn set of folks who still read this and watch is largely overlapped, but for those who don’t it’s a alt-history of the 20thC/21stC space race on a divergent world-line where the USSR got to the moon first. As with most things prestige-tv, that becomes a setting for a soap opera, but hey.

But – the above moment, where one of the main characters communicates from Mars to their daughter was notable for the proustian rush it gave.

A perfect period piece of UI in production design – the brushed chrome and aqua buttons of the early aughts.

To have that kind of historical reference point from a field so profoundly (proudly?) ahistorical as design for technology is a shock.