Movie Computers

Eugene Miya wrote On 06-05-06 12:19,:

Perhaps it shows how much more farsighted movie studios are than computer companies. From early times, it seems, the studios twigged to the benefits of standardized components. They never wasted time and money converting between EBCDIC and ASCII, or between BigEndian, LittleEndian, and MiddleEndian. They never listened to the siren song of GaAs, they never fell victim to "dusty deck syndrome," they never suffered overnight obsolescence of a roomful of expensive hardware. Their machine was never hacked, never relayed any spam, never suffered a DoS, and never, ever crashed until the hero instructed it to compute all the digits of pi (yet again). Who among us can boast such a record of reliability and economy?

Yet the movie industry is not unwilling to experiment. Quite a different computer is featured in a short film called "The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It," starring John Cleese. The computer communicates via a clacky typewriter, and when the machine meets its end (not by being unplugged but by being plugged -- five or six rounds from an officer's sidearm), the typewriter renders its parting, er, shot:

Y O U D I R T Y R A T ! . .

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