Computers in the movies

[zuben el genub]

A Short History of Computers in the Movies: Panel Lights, Spinning Tapes, and Lab Coats

 

[MoodyBlues]

It's a pretty good list, but I'm shocked at its failure to mention WarGames and Jurassic Park.

Speaking of the latter, here's a sound bite from my favorite line of the movie: It's a UNIX system! I know this!

 

[mikedt]

It's a pretty good list, but I'm shocked at its failure to mention WarGames and Jurassic Park.

Speaking of the latter, here's a sound bite from my favorite line of the movie: It's a UNIX system! I know this!

Was a Mits Altair in WarGames I think, I remember that. What computer was it in Jurassic Park?

 

[MoodyBlues]

Was a Mits Altair in WarGames I think, I remember that.

This reminds me--I have WarGames DVRed, but I haven't watched it lately. I should! I love that movie.

What computer was it in Jurassic Park?

If I ever knew this, I had forgotten. So I let IMDb tell me these tidbits:

The computer in the back of the computer room with the many (65536) red LEDs is actually a real computer: The Connection Machine CM-5 made by Thinking Machines. It contained many SPARC 2 RISC processors and the LEDs were added to make the machine more aesthetically pleasing than their previous models. Unfortunately, it was not actually a very good supercomputer and the company failed not long afterward. The comment about networking eight connection machines is pretty superfluous as they were meant to be used like this. The bigger problem was writing programs that efficiently mapped onto the data parallel architecture.

The park software is written in Pascal; a program is clearly visible in one of the monitor close-ups on the UNIX system. The graphical interface recognized as a UNIX system was the experimental Silicon Graphics 3D File System Navigator. The version number of the Silicon Graphics UNIX Operating System is 4.0.5 and is visible in one of the close-ups in the operating system's shell window (command program).

 

[mikedt]

This reminds me--I have WarGames DVRed, but I haven't watched it lately. I should! I love that movie.

Heh..one of my favourite movies as well. Just been watching it again this afternoon(Chinese website). It wasn't a Mits it was an Imsai, can see the name clearly visible "Imsai Floppy Disk", "Imsai Modem", etc. LOL. Product placement I think. Of course there's lots of computers in that movie, flashing lights, spinning tapes, huge mag disks, etc.

...and in Linux there's...

mike@mike-Ideapad-S110:~ > wargames
Would you like to play a game? yes
A strange game.
The only winning move is
not to play.
mike@mike-Ideapad-S110:~ >

 

[MoodyBlues]

...and in Linux there's...

mike@mike-Ideapad-S110:~ > wargames
Would you like to play a game? yes
A strange game.
The only winning move is
not to play.
mike@mike-Ideapad-S110:~ >

I don't think I knew about this. Until now!

$ wargames
Would you like to play a game? yes
A strange game.
The only winning move is
not to play.
$ wargames
Would you like to play a game? no
A strange game.
The only winning move is
not to play.