From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:ucbesvax!turner Newsgroups: net.movies Title: Re: computers in the movies - (nf) Article-I.D.: ucbcad.740 Posted: Tue Mar 1 02:33:28 1983 Received: Wed Mar 2 06:09:13 1983 #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 Turner