csc (02/24/83)
Some scenes from a yet to be released movie named "Utilities" were filmed here in Waterloo. (We have a very impressive looking machine room). Rather than film the existing computers (which the public wouldn't identify as computers), they brought in some big ugly metal prop with hundreds of blinking lights. Ironically, the film crew used the real 4341's as tables, benches, and one lighting man even sat on one! Why can't they make a movie with a believable computer? (A small, black box with a terminal attached...one that doesn't spin tape drives, flash lights, or spew data out on a teletype)? -jan ...watmath!csc
turner (03/01/83)
#R:watmath:-463400:ucbesvax:6400003:000:1148
ucbesvax!turner Mar 1 01:19:00 1983
My favorite bit of hilarity along these lines is "The Forbin Project".
This was filmed in part at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley
when I was a teeny-hacker there. (Teeny-hackers abound these days, but
in 1972 we were rare as hen's teeth.)
They had a fair amount of computer-allusive effects throughout the
film (after all, who is the main character but Forbin's Project?) but
I'll never forget playing with an IBM 1620 all afternoon one day,
marveling at that machine's decrepitude, and then going to see this
movie: only to discover that the world's most powerful computer is
made up of old 1620 consoles!
These wonderful hulks are SO SLOW that you can watch programs
execute through the console lights, of which there are many. It had
A BCD arithmetic unit, which needed ADDITION tables (in ROM). Australia
still uses them for tax-returns, I think.
So if you want to know where the flashing lights come from in
the popular movie-image of computers, ask IBM. They didn't abandon
it as part of console design until the mid-seventies.
Beep, Flash, Whir,
Michael Turnerjdd (03/01/83)
The biggest problem in the representations of computers in
the movies is that producers and directors don't ever see
real computers, but they do see each other's work.
This inbreeding of the imagination is obvious in almost all
of the TV and most of the movies that one sees. The catch-22
(good book, poor movie) is that they are giving us what we
want, which is what we are used to, which is what they are
used to, which is why they give it to us, and so forth.
The solution is to nuke Hollywood.
Cheers,
John ("Send Flames to allegra!honey") DeTreville
Bell Labs, Murray Hillzrm (03/03/83)
The really bad thing about computers in the movies is that real computers are about as fun as watching a roomful of refridgerators. Now with front loading tape drives you can't even show the big old IBM tape drives sliding their doors shut under the Giant Brain's command, air hissing from the vacuum columns. But maybe TSOANM might make it, DG computers look like something off the set of Barbarella. Cheers, Zig
wjl (03/03/83)
The movie (FRANCESS) stunk!
I saw the same story 3 times in the same movie!
top thatterryl (03/05/83)
How about my all-time favorite turkey that featured a computer as the main character??? Of course, I'm not talking about "Colossus: The Forbin Project". I kinda liked that one, just because they did use such ancient, slow and archaic machinery in the movie. Nope, I'm talking about the REALLY big turkey.... "The Demon Seed". You know, the one that impregnated a woman and put it's soul(please, no philosophical or religous flames!!!) in the kid's body!!! Actually, I thought the computer did a much better acting job than any of the "REAL" actors.
hal (03/13/83)
The 360s did have reasonably impressive consoles, but I'd like to nominate a couple of others for having more impressive displays. First, the 360/195-370/195. These were very fast processors for scientific work. The older ones had a light bay about 3 times the size of a normal 360 console with lights for most of the major logic gates in the processor. Very impressive looking. The Burroughs 6700 also had a slick display. This was a dual processor machine in its basic configuration. Each processor had a big display showing all the processor registers and major flip-flops. When the processor was put in an idle loop by the operating system waiting for an interrupt, the registers were loaded with the appropriate bit pattern to display a big Burroughs "B" in the lights. Finally, I've only been told stories about this one, but I did hear about it from folks who had first hand knowledge. At one of the big Air Force bases outside Phoenix there was an old tube computer that did a lot of real-time processing for the air defense system. Attached to each logic line in the system was a small nixie lamp. These lights were arrayed on a very large display (at least 12 feet wide and maybe 5 feet tall), and the thousands of lights created quite a display. This machine was apparently very easy to service because there wasn't any need to stick logic probes into it to find out the problem--one only had to go look at the lights. I'm told that this monster was still installed in the mid 70s. I'm also told that on occasion, some very stoned Air Force people would pass their time sitting in a trance in front of the blinking lights. Hal Perkins
aps (03/14/83)
I thing that rocheste!brown is correct in his saying that Hollywood is right and the manufactures are wrong. (I loved the 1620; it was my first!!) However, I think that the IBM 370/168 was the best as far as lights and buttons go. There was a full panel (I seem to recall a meter for I/O rate) and two large panels that were really fiche "display screens with neon lights behind it". Change the fiche and the meanings of the lights would change! All this plus a big green eye that they called a console terminal. I myself, have a PDP-11/70 front panel (not the RD crud) that I will be hanging on decvax, anyday now. It was a shame that they rapped those 1620's for the movie! Could they have been using 1620 as bit-slices and you could control each slice through the front panel? I better stop now. aps.
russ (03/18/83)
#R:watmath:-463400:kirk:22700003:000:361 kirk!russ Mar 16 15:19:00 1983 A friend, Eric, tells me about the fun they had with a Cyber front panel. It was equipped with a vector display which could display the pc as a dot on an xy display. Eric used to write programs which would manipulate the dot by using wait loops at the proper address. Oh well, I guess that he tells it better than I. Russ Nelson ...hp-pcd!hp-cvd!russ