[majormajor]

Yeah, there's a big list of global differences around "what technology was around when these systems started getting built." Results in a weird mix of things looking both more and less futuristic than wherever home is in certain places; for me this was most striking when visiting Japan a while back and seeing how automated with vending machines and such a lot of ramen shops were compared to the US, but at the same time how cash-based they still were - the vending machines were very clearly very mechanical, not networked or "smart" machines, that just processed paper money and nothing else.

[ImaCake]

I was in Japan last year, and I found the the ramen shop vending machines to very useful and reliably good at their job. What struck me as weird in Japan was the dominance of flip phones. I think they use them for credit card transactions and email which they pioneered earlier. So when smartphones came along, they didn't adopt them as rapidly as the US or Australia.