Many writers in the 80s would still have been too young to remember WW2 (some might have even been born after it entirely) and there are still plenty of sci-fi stories and scripts being written which are based in the future.
I think the explanation is a simpler one: writers didn't know any better. In the 50s through to 80s exaggerated predictions were made based on observations of the way tech was advancing at that time (much of that kind of tech was new). However after people grew up and realised those predictions were vastly over optimistic they would then go on to set their science fiction stories at a more pragmatic date in the future. Sometimes writers these days don't even specify a date and I suspect that's intentional to avoid jokes about it's "predictions".
Simply put: Writers these days are just more aware of how quickly dates change and how long their content remains in the cultural conciousness.
It's also worth baring in mind that a lot of the time these kinds of stories are "alt universe" type stuff. ie based on some theoretically similar universe to ours as well as x number of years in the future.
For someone born in the 50s , reality caught up with predictions pretty fast, even overtaking them
A ton of the sci-fi from after WWII has cold-war undertones, nuclear fallout / post-apocalyptic, block politics, space race between US/USSR, etc. Cyber punk started at the end of the Cold War, when the total nuclear war risk was less present.
I read your comments about 3 months ago on a FORTH post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20865684
And you mentioned that you are developing a game that completely emulate C64 interface and players have to write programs to control the starship through it.
THis is very interesting idea (I'm actually playing an elevator emulator which has the same idea), and I'm wondering if you have a homepage or something?
Thanks in advance! Wish we could see some serious programming games in the future. Whenever I play System Shock or Alien Isolation I think that the hacking part could be more interesting by actually asking the player to do some simple programming...
It's now been a generation since and while the world is filled with tragedy, there has been no apocalyptic scale war in most living persons' memory. People don't need to escape to a fantasy world where the future is bright; we live in a bright future already. So we see more media around dark futures, new wars, and apocalypses; because those are fantasies in the minds of the modern viewers.
That's overall a good thing, though yes we miss out on a lot of that optimistic-futuristic creativity of the past.