alfter@MRCNEXT.CSO.UIUC.EDU (Scott Alfter) (04/07/90)
I went to see _The_Hunt_For_Red_October_ twice. It's a great movie; if you
haven't seen it, you should make a beeline to the nearest theater. You might
also want to get Tom Clancy's book on which the movie is based; it is loaded
with technical detail, most of which is as accurate as it gets in fiction.
Why am I talking about a movie in comp.sys.apple2, though? Why isn't this in
rec.arts.movies? I found a discrepancy today between Clancy's text and the
movie as you see it in theaters, and it has to do with the Apple II--believe
it or not!
Tom Clancy writes: (page 23 of the re-released paperback)
------------------------------------start------------------------------------
...For three years now he had been working on _Fighting_Sailor_, an authorized
biography of Fleet Admiral William Halsey. Nearly all of it was contained on
a half-dozen floppy disks lying next to his Apple computer.
"Daddy?" Ryan's daughter was staring up at him.
"And how's my little Sally today?"
"Fine."
Ryan picked her up and set her on his lap, careful to slide his chair away from
the keyboard. Sally was all checked out on games and educational programs, and
occasionally thought that this meant she was able to handle Wordstar also.
Once that had resulted in the loss of twenty thousand words of electronically
recorded manuscript. And a spanking.
-------------------------------------end-------------------------------------
The book was first published in 1984. Considering that this is fairly early in
the book, this particular passage was probably written earlier--probably no
later than 1983. What's the significance of this? The Macintosh didn't yet
exist at that time, and I doubt that Jack Ryan would have shelled out the
ten thousand dollars for a Lisa. Considering that the Apple III's sales were
never something to be proud of either, what does that leave? According to the
novel, Jack Ryan was writing his Halsey biography on an Apple II! (One with a
CP/M card added also, if he was using Wordstar. 1983 was also a bit before
AppleWorks.)
OK, so an Apple II is in the story, but what does that have to do with the
movie? In the movie, they cut from a scene in Polijarny, where the _Red_
_October_ is just leaving, to a room in Jack Ryan's house in England, the
room where he's working on his novel. What computer do they show there? It
ain't an Apple II--it looked to me like some godforsaken Messy-DOS laptop!
(And no, I didn't mistake it for a Mac Portable, which would at least have
been an Apple, or a IIc with a flat screen--it clearly was neither of those
computers.)
Just thought you'd appreciate a little something different... :-)
Scott Alfter-------------------------------------------------------------------
Internet: alfter@mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu _/_ Apple II: the power to be your best!
cs122aw@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu / v \
saa33413@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu ( ( A keyboard--how quaint!
Bitnet: free0066@uiucvmd.bitnet \_^_/ --M. Scott, STIV