We laugh at sci-fi for how it over-explains technology, but we also need to make fun of how Victorians describe any time period that takes place more than ten years before the book's publishing date.
It's like if we wrote like this about the '80s or '90s.
According to the curious fashions of the day, she wore a shirt of tie-dye print. It may seem quaint to our modern sensibilities, but such colorful styles were a common sight in any public street of those times.
At the time this story occurred, it was not uncommon for young men to wear their hair cropped closely around the face, but allow the hair behind the head to grow until it brushed the level of the shoulders.
In those days, the information superhighway was little more than a crude unpaved path, full of hazards and beset by brigands, so it is not strange that our heroine, instead of entering her query into the search bar on her browser, went to the public library and scoured the books on the shelves for the information she sought.
She and her friends went to the theater to see E.T. How strange to think that film was once at the heights of popularity and acclaim, as well-known in its day as films like The Hunger Games or The Avengers have become in the intervening time.
I get that the lack of video and audio recording made it harder for future generations to experience the details of the past, and that technology was changing their world at a faster rate than ever before, but also, dude, it was only, like, forty years ago, so maybe chill out a bit.
