From: Jim Fehlinger (fehlinger@home.com)
Date: Sun Feb 04 2001 - 21:11:37 MST
...in the movies and on TV (especially, but not exclusively, sci-fi).
With machines, as with people, beauty can be skin deep (and in the eye
of the beholder).
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> The constraints of making computers interesting on film are rather
> hard; ...they have to be visually exciting. It will be interesting to
> see for how long the current movie-style of computers will persist as
> computer literacy increases. I guess just as long as the magical properties
> of cars on film...
>
> http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/01jan/uf002622.gif
> http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/01jan/uf002624.gif
> http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/01jan/uf002625.gif
Anders' remarks and my earlier mention of the IBM 1620 console panel
featured in _Colossus: The Forbin Project_ have recalled to me two
other pretty faces from the early history of computers which were
featured in TV shows and movies of the 60's and 70's: the ElectroData
Datatron 205 (Burroughs B-205), and the SAGE maintenance console,
which I've taken the liberty to reminisce about.
I've included links below to some Web sites containing interesting
historical trivia about computers and to others containing pictures of
some old machines. I've also included links to some TV and movie
stills I captured myself from DVD and laserdisc. My links are the
ones with "fehlinger" in them. They're in pairs, with the ones having
"_small" in the name all being 300 pixels in width and having been
subjected to maximum JPEG compression; the companions of these are up
to 1200 pixels in width and JPEG-compressed at "high" quality,
according to Photoshop. The sizes (in KBytes) are given next to the
links. My ISP provides very limited Web hosting for subscribers, and
it's not particularly speedy. I've checked some of the big images by
accessing them from work (shocking waste of my employer's bandwidth!),
but was only able to get them more-or-less without trouble in the
evening; during the day, some of them only partially downloaded when
Explorer claimed "Done", or stalled indefinitely (this may have been
bandwidth overload at my employer's end). The small images should be
much easier to download, and are probably adequate for most people.
Also, I haven't asked permission from the copyright owners to exhibit
any of the stills I made myself, so they could disappear at a moment's
notice if I or my ISP get a letter from a movie studio's legal
department, or if I exceed my allowable bandwidth for Web hosting (I
don't remember what it is, but it isn't much! -- if there's a surge in
demand, I'm sure they'll just assume I've posted porn pictures). If
you've managed to download one of these into your browser, and you
think you might like to look at it again, it would probably be best to
save it on your local machine. All the Irwin Allen stills I've
captured were taken from the recently-released Image Entertainment DVD
of the 1995 _The Fantasy Worlds of Irwin Allen_, and are the property
of Twentieth Century Fox Television.
For comprehensive lists of movies containing themes related to
computers, see "Hollywood & Computers" at the University of
Minnesota's Charles Babbage Institute Web site,
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/resources/hollywood.html and also the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's "Cybercinema" Web site,
at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/cybercinema/ .
For a definition of the technical term "blinkenlights" :->, the full
text of the ersatz-German "Achtung! Alles Lookenspeepers!" (as well as
a fractured English version by German hackers), and an amusing
discussion of the significance of blinkenlights in the history of
computing, see
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/blinkenlights.html
(this is a link to the "Jargon File Resources" Web site,
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/ , the on-line source of the book
_The New Hacker's Dictionary_ (Eric S. Raymond, MIT Press, 3rd
ed. 1996). See also http://www.blinkenlights.com .
-----------------------------
When the earliest generation of digital computers was reaching the end
of its useful life in the early 1960's, at least one Hollywood studio
(reputed to be Twentieth Century Fox :->) had the idea of salvaging
the most visually interesting pieces of these old dinosaurs for use as
props in movies and TV shows. Producer Irwin Allen, schlockmeister of
the American sci-fi television shows of the 60's, caused two 50's
computers to become instantly recognizable to aficionados of 60's TV,
though only people with some knowledge of the folklore of those early
machines are likely to be able to actually identify them by name.
THE DATATRON 205
The first of these recycled gizmos to achieve iconic status was
committed to film in the original pilot of Allen's _Lost In Space_
television series (title: "No Place To Hide"). Half a dozen of them
were visible during the course of this slow pan of the "Alpha Control"
mission control room:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/alpha_control_small.jpg (13)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/alpha_control.jpg (150)
The technician in this still is staring at the panel of blinking
lights as if it were a display terminal; at least these people would
not be tempted to waste their employers' time surfing the Web! The
date in the storyline of this show is October, 1997.
Three more of these devices were present throughout the TV series on
the flight deck of the "Jupiter II" spacecraft, on the ledge
underneath the panes of the ship's bay window (:->, the
"navi-computers"):
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/jupiter_II_small.jpg (13)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/jupiter_II.jpg (175)
Here's the story of these gadgets: In the mid-50's, there was a
computer manufacturer called the ElectroData Corporation, which was
spun off, according to various sources on the Web (see, for instance,
http://www.digiweb.com/~hansp/ccc/ccorgs.htm#Electrodata ), from the
Consolidated Electrodynamics Corporation in 1954. They were selling a
computer with vacuum tube circuitry and magnetic drum memory called
the Datatron 205, which became the Burroughs B-205 when ElectroData
was acquired by the Burroughs Corporation in 1956 (there was actually
a family of these machines, including the Datatron 204, 205, and 220).
Many of the programmer/operator consoles of these machines were saved
from the scrap heap when they were decommissioned in the early 1960's,
on account of their visual appeal, and a lot of them ended up in Irwin
Allen's pilot for _Lost In Space_. A testament to the iconic status
of these boxes is the fact that the Burroughs B-205 has its own fan
site on the Web! -- see http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/B205/index.html .
As documented in pictures at this Web site, the B-205 console
appeared not only in _Lost In Space_ (1965-1968), but also as the
"Bat-computer" in the _Batman_ television series (1966-1968) and in
the movie _Fantastic Voyage_ (1966). Not just the console, but an
entire B-205 mainframe appeared in the 1959 film _The Angry Red
Planet_ (which I have not seen). This Web site also suggests the
existence of an active present-day market in the scavenging and
refurbishing of these units, as well as in the building and selling of
replicas (there's one replica listed here for sale at $3,000 -- I
don't know if the offer is current; you'll have to contact the
seller!). Of course, the B-205 constitutes just one corner of the
subculture of vintage computer collecting.
For the personal story of one obsessed fan's mania to acquire these
objects, see http://www.alphacontrol.com/whoarewe.htm . There are a
number of ironies in all this. For one thing, the price of one of
these do-nothing 60 lb. boxes far exceeds that of a fully- functional
modern computer. In addition, the really important functional
circuitry of the old computers was of no interest (at least not to
Hollywood or the fans) -- that is long gone, while only the consoles
(and a few tape drive units) remain. Finally, while these B-205
consoles are the shells, at least, of what was once genuine computer
equipment, their depiction on the screen is distorted in several ways.
Their multiplicity often exceeds what would have been seen in a real
computer installation (only one console would have been needed by a
real computer, typically), in order to concentrate the visual
appeal. In other cases, a single console by itself is identified as
"the computer".
The original neon lamps in these consoles were replaced by bulbs
emitting a much brighter glow than would have been seen in real use,
in order to satisfy the needs of the camera and make the illumination
register on film. These were driven by timing circuits which caused
the patterns of lights to change with a cycle time of anywhere from
about an eighth of a second to one second -- blinking faster, but
still slowly enough for the blinks to be discrete to the naked eye,
was usually meant to suggest to the viewer that the computer was
"working harder". In the real world, these boxes were debugging aids,
and the lights would have represented the contents of various
processor registers, so seeing them change so slowly would imply that
not much computing is getting done -- all very well and good if a
programmer were single-stepping the processor through a piece of code
in order to trace its execution. However, in the science-fictional
milieus in which they are seen, such details are omitted, and the
functional significance of the light show is left to the viewer's
imagination.
Still, there's an undeniably hypnotic quality to these blinking
lights. Allen used a sort of blinking checkerboard to represent a
computer on the bridge of the submarine "Seaview" in another sci-fi
show from the same period, _Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea_ (1964-1968):
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/voyage_small.jpg (14)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/voyage.jpg (210)
In retrospect, that prop bore a striking resemblance to a cellular
automaton of some sort, though the patterns were too regular and
repetitive to be very interesting. Perhaps it was also meant to
suggest the pattern of punches on a Hollerith card, which would have
been familiar to most people by that time, and which would have
suggested "computer" even to the uninitiated. A blinking checkerboard
or punched-card motif is also seen in the opening titles of the _Lost
In Space_ series.
Not to put too fine a point on the matter, the aesthetic appeal of
these patterns of illuminated lightbulbs recalls a passage in Edelman
and Tononi's _A Universe of Consciousness_, in which the authors
describe bitmaps of a simulated visual cortex representing a healthy
adult brain contrasted with either 1. an old, deteriorated cortex or
2. an immature cortex. The pictures representing the healthy adult
cortex "show continually changing patterned activity, corresponding to
both high (but less than case 1) entropy **and** high (but less than
case 2) functional integration, resulting in maximal complexity".
Apprehending such complexity, on some optimal boundary between order
and chaos, seems to engage the human aesthetic faculty. It's a pity
that the dazzling complexity of modern computers is completely
concealed from view inside featureless boxes, and only the functional
results of the operations of these machines are considered pertinent
to human users. It would be nice, just for the entertainment value,
to be able to open a window into a modern microprocessor's innards in
order to see some aesthetically-appealing representation of the
complex activity within. I've always been a bit disappointed that my
own career as a computer programmer began well after the era of
blinkenlights was over! Data storage media, as well, now bear their
contents invisibly, unlike punched cards or punched paper tape.
The computer science department at the University of Virginia's School
of Engineering and Applied Science has a Web site devoted to computer
memorabilia from that university's own past at
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/museum.html . It turns out that
UVa's first computer (in 1960) was none other than a Burroughs B-205,
so Irwin Allen's classic prop can be seen in its native environment at
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/new_images/b205.gif . This Web
site even has scans of the original Burroughs documentation for the
equipment; see, for instance, the "Burroughs 205 Control Console and
Consolette Handbook" (Bulletin 3027, printed May, 1956) at
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/images/manuals/b205/console/console_1.html
(only selected pages are there, not the whole manual). I had a book
when I was a kid (_The World of Science_ by Jane Werner Watson, Golden
Press, 1958) that had a photo of this machine, and I also remember
seeing one in a Burroughs ad in a late-50's issue of _Scientific
American_.
There is a Web site called "Ed Thelen's Nike Missile Web Site"
( http://ed-thelen.org ) which also contains the germ of a site that
will be an on-line accompaniment to the spin-off of the Boston
Computer Museum that was established last year at the NASA Ames
Research Center in Mountain View, California (see
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/cmhc-history.html ). The page at
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist has a large collection (mostly
uncatalogued and unlabelled) of monochrome photos of vintage computer
installations in their heyday. Some of these are of Burroughs B-204
and B-205 machines, for example:
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-burroughs-204.jpg
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-burroughs-204-a.jpg
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-burroughs-204-110.jpg
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-burroughs-205-127.jpg
SAGE
A second collection of recycled gear utilized by Irwin Allen on TV and
in the movies is considerably more imposing than the Burroughs console
from _Lost In Space_. It can be seen here in the background behind
Robert Colbert and Lee Meriwether in a still from the television
series _The Time Tunnel_ (1966-1967):
http://www.iann.net/timetunnel/EPS/EP1/ep1078.jpg .
If the following Usenet post is true, this item also appeared as late as
1996 as set dressing on an ABC News television broadcast: see
http://neil.franklin.ch/Usenet/alt.folklore.computers/19980113_SAGE
(search down the page for "ABC").
In the early Cold War days, the U. S. government funded the design and
manufacture of an enormously ambitious and expensive computer system
that was to automate the identification and tracking of potentially
hostile aircraft penetrating North American continental airspace.
This was the notorious SAGE system (Semi-Automatic Ground
Environment). The hardware design was begun in 1951 as Project
Whirlwind at MIT's Lincoln Lab, and production machines were
manufactured by IBM as the AN/FSQ7 computer. Each of these machines
(comprising a pair of CPUs) used 60,000 vacuum tubes (and a few
thousand transistors as well), weighed 250 tons, and consumed 3
megawatts of power (enough for an entire suburban development, but a
SAGE installation had its own generators). A network of 23 SAGE
"Direction Centers" was eventually deployed, the first coming on-line
in 1956 and the last in 1962. The last remaining SAGE Direction
Center (a Canadian installation) was decommissioned in 1983. When
this system was first envisioned, the main threat to U. S. security
was perceived to be long-range bombers carrying hydrogen bombs, as
depicted in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 movie _Dr. Strangelove_. There is
an article entitled "Dr. Strangelove Meets IBM: The SAGE System" at
http://www.ddj.com/articles/2000/0085/0085a/0085a.htm (see also "The
SAGE Site" at http://www.togger.com/_main_page.shtml and Ed Thelen's
article at http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/sage.html ) By the time the
system was complete in 1962, it was already effectively obsolete, and
the state of the art in weapons delivery had shifted to the
inter-continental ballistic missile, which SAGE was too slow to be of
any use against.
Some commentators laud SAGE for being a nursery of many useful
technologies, while others decry it as being the first spectacular
computer boondoggle. In any case, Hollywood made the best of things
by acquiring retired SAGE equipment for use as high-tech props in
movies and TV shows. In particular, the AN/FSQ7 Maintenance Console,
a sloping person-high bank of lights, knobs, and switches (a real
AN/FSQ7 installation sported a pair these, one for each of the
duplexed CPUs), made its screen debut on Irwin Allen's _The Time
Tunnel_ in 1966:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/tunnel_1_small.jpg (20)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/tunnel_1.jpg (240).
This formed part of a larger set design obviously heavily
influenced by the decade-older _Forbidden Planet_:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/tunnel2_small.jpg (18)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/tunnel2.jpg (259)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/tunnel3_small.jpg (22)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/tunnel3.jpg (277).
The SAGE console in _The Time Tunnel_ was flanked at either end by an
ASR-33 teletype, and some Burroughs tape drives:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/tunnel4_small.jpg (14)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/tunnel4.jpg (195).
As noted in the alt.folklore.computers Usenet thread mentioned above (the
URL, once again, is
http://neil.franklin.ch/Usenet/alt.folklore.computers/19980113_SAGE ),
the big monitor displaying Lissajous figures was probably not part of
the original SAGE installation (:->):
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/tunnel5_small.jpg (14)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/tunnel5.jpg (235).
Not surprisingly, a section of a SAGE console also eventually appeared
on the bridge of the Seaview, along the wall -- er, bulkhead to the
left of the blinking checkerboard, IIRC (not visible in the still
above, but see http://www.iann.net/voyage/manbeast/pages/voya038.html ).
Some individual panels from SAGE consoles are also visible at the
sides of the radar screens in the Jupiter II still above.
There are photos of a real AN/FSQ7 SAGE installation at "The SAGE Site
Photo Page", http://www.togger.com/photos/_photos.shtml and also at
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-sage-a.jpg . As with the B-205
consoles, the SAGE maintenance console was represented on screen as
"the computer", whereas in real life the AN/FSQ7 CPUs were housed in a
different room from that containing the maintenance consoles and the
aircraft tracking displays (a wonderful bit of trivia: the tracking
displays had built-in cigarette lighters and ashtrays for the
convenience of the SAGE operators. Later it was noticed that airborne
particulates were gumming up the magnetic drum memory units, after
which smoking was banned in these installations).
At a time when few members of the general public would have had the
opportunity to interact with or even see a computer personally, Irwin
Allen's television shows established visual tropes for the computer
that made a lasting impression on the viewers of those programs.
Using decommissioned gear saved him money while providing him with
complex, attractive props (even as mere exteriors, they had been
designed by their manufacturers for a purpose, and Allen didn't have
to repeat the labor and expense of that design) that bore up well even
to closeup shots. However, this equipment was already anywhere from 5
to 10 years out-of-date when it first appeared on TV, and whatever
window of plausibility existed for these props representing computer
hardware of the future closed abruptly with the 1968 release of
Kubrick's _2001_. Nevertheless, both the Datatron and the SAGE props
retain their technophilic aesthetic appeal to this day; they were
cannily chosen in that regard. Also, they clearly had a heavy
influence on the "in-house" prop and set designs developed by art
director Walter M. ("Matt") Jefferies for the original _Star Trek_
television series.
A final bit of computer trivia from the _Lost in Space_ pilot: the
prop seen in the foreground in
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/alpha2_small.jpg (15)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/alpha2.jpg (161)
and in closeup in
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/alpha3_small.jpg (14)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/alpha3.jpg (183)
looks to me very much like a reworked Burroughs B-220 console; compare:
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-burroughs-220-152.jpg . This
prop was also used in the late-60's pilots for two never-to-be-made TV
shows called _City Beneath The Sea_ and _The Man From The Twenty-Fifth
Century_:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/city1_small.jpg (15)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/city1.jpg (231)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/25th_1_small.jpg (12)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/25th_1.jpg (190).
SAGE equipment also appeared in both these pilots:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/25th_2_small.jpg (12)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/25th_2.jpg (16).
When Irwin Allen gave up producing, umm, unchallenging sci-fi for TV
mass audiences in the 60's to take up the disaster-movie genre in the
70's (see http://www.iann.net/irwinallen/iaprofil.htm ), the SAGE
maintenance console went with him, to appear in _The Towering Inferno_
(1974) as the building security computer of the ill-fated skyscraper.
As a conventionalized representation of a contemporary (rather than
futuristic) computer, the brief glimpse we have of this prop does not
detract unduly from the overall credibility of the film; nevertheless,
we are seeing equipment from the vacuum-tube era in a movie that was
released at the beginning of the microprocessor age -- a bit of a
generation gap. In the following still,
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/inferno1_small.jpg (11)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/inferno1.jpg (178),
the small device at the end of the red-painted console next to
which O. J. Simpson is standing looks very much like the keyboard from
an IBM keypunch (for example, the Model 029:
http://www.rdrop.com/~jimw/ibm029~3.jpg and
http://www.rdrop.com/~jimw/ibm029~1.jpg ).
Here's another view of the security room from _The Towering Inferno_,
showing the panels from the SAGE maintenance console. The IBM
cathode-ray tube display visible in this still is a very up-to-date
mid-70's terminal found in contemporary System/370 computer
installations of that period (compare
http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/events/anniversaries/40th/images/ibm370_1682/20.html
and http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/ibm3275.html ), making its
juxtaposition with the SAGE equipment a glaring anachronism. It was
the advent of CRT console displays like these that brought the
blinkenlights era to a close in the 70's by making front-panel
register lights superfluous. There is also a pair of tape drives
(Burroughs, if I'm not mistaken) visible in the still below (what
would a computer be without tape drives? what's a disk drive? :->):
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/inferno2_small.jpg (11)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/inferno2.jpg (182).
The SAGE equipment got its most intimate portrayal on film
(appropriately enough) in the 1972 Woody Allen comedy _Everything You
Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*but were afraid to ask)_. In the
final segment of this movie, titled (the prudish should avert their
eyes) "what happens during ejaculation?", the SAGE console adds visual
spice to the "Brain Room" presided over by Tony Randall and around a
dozen more white-coated technicians (including a gum-chewing Burt
Reynolds):
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything1_small.jpg (15)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything1.jpg (179)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything4_small.jpg (15)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything4.jpg (194).
This segment, by the way, provides one of the best illustrations I know
of the fallacy of the homunculus, familiar to philosophers of consciousness
(two others being the animated brain homunculi depicted in the old Bell
Science films _Gateway to the Mind_ and _Hemo the Magnificent_).
Compare the panels that Burt Reynolds is standing in front of in the
next two stills to the first of the _Time Tunnel_ stills given above.
"Scratch the left leg":
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything2_small.jpg (14)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything2.jpg (187).
"We're on the thighs, and stroking":
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything5_small.jpg (13)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything5.jpg (174).
A positive visual match between these movie shots and photos available
on the Web of a real SAGE installation is difficult to establish, but
compare the color photo at the bottom left of the page
http://www.togger.com/photos/_photos.shtml with the following still:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything3_small.jpg (11)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything3.jpg (167).
Since a SAGE installation consumed 3 megawatts of electricity, it's
not surprising that much of the instrumentation should be devoted to
monitoring the health of the power supply (a necessity for all
machines of the vacuum-tube era, in addition to controls for
monitoring and diagnosing the health of the vacuum tubes themselves):
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything7_small.jpg (13)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything7.jpg (192).
Metal-edged control keys and indicator lights such as these were
typical of IBM equipment in the 50's and early 60's:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything6_small.jpg (9)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything6.jpg (136)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything8_small.jpg (9)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/everything8.jpg (112).
Compare the IBM 1620 console photo at
http://www.computerhistory.org/old/IBM1620/ , the IBM 709 and 7094
photos (recent color photos of junked machines) at
http://www.teleport.com/~prp/collect/main.html , and the monochrome Ed
Thelen photos at http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-0500.jpg ,
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-0513.jpg ,
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-0550.jpg . The System/360,
introduced in 1964, sported a new and different look -- see, for
example http://www.nfrpartners.com/comphistory/hdcmod30d.htm and
http://www.nfrpartners.com/comphistory/hnbmod30.htm ).
The SAGE prop also appeared in Woody Allen's 1973 _Sleeper_. In the
following still, the Woody Allen character Miles Monroe, disguised as
a robot, is chased around the Domesticon repair facility by security
guards while SAGE blinks in the background:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/sleeper_small.jpg (12)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/sleeper.jpg (132).
The question of plausibility doesn't really arise with the Woody Allen
movies, since they are in any case intended as over-the-top parodies
of the sci-fi genre. Nevertheless, it must have been a source of
hilarity to the personnel operating the remaining SAGE Direction
Centers to see this familiar equipment in the TV and movie settings in
which it was placed by Irwin Allen and Woody Allen.
The total amount of money spent on the SAGE project remains classified
to this day, but has been estimated at eight to twelve billion 1964
dollars (according to
http://www.ddj.com/articles/2000/0085/0085a/0085a.htm ). SAGE
skeptics claim that the primary usefulness of this expenditure was to
impress VIPs (according to http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/sage.html ).
To this must be added the construction of very entertaining and
memorable computer props for the television and movie industry :->.
Perhaps the final humiliation for remaining bits of the SAGE prop
occurred in the 1995 documentary film _The Fantasy Worlds of
Irwin_Allen_:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/robot_small.jpg (16)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/robot.jpg (225).
-----------------------------
Some other memorable appearances of real computer equipment in the
movies include Stanley Kubrick's 1964 _Dr. Strangelove_, which
contains a shot of an Air Force IBM mainframe installation containing
genuine contemporary hardware in a realistic setting:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/strangelove_small.jpg (17)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/strangelove.jpg (201).
It's difficult to read the model number in this still, but
according to http://www.thocp.net/timeline/1961.htm this is likely an
IBM 7040 or 7044 being used as an I/O processor handling card readers
and printers for a faster 7090 or 7094 system.
The 1975 Sydney Pollack film _Three Days of the Condor_ features a
genuine Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 minicomputer in a not very
realistic setting:
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/condor_small.jpg (10)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/condor.jpg (118).
In this still, the device to the right of the computer (that looks like
an overhead projector) is an automatic page-turning flatbed scanner (I
suppose it might be an example of early Kurzweil equipment, but I
haven't been able to find any confirmation of this). In the film, the
system is shown scanning far-East journals in an ideographic language,
while the computer prints out a side-by-side version in transliterated
Roman characters and translated English. Pretty impressive for a
PDP-8! Later in the film, the computer has apparently been halted in
mid-program; the assassin Joubert (played by Max von Sydow) causes the
Decwriter to resume printing by flipping the Run/Halt switch on the
front panel. Not exactly standard operating procedure for a real
system. There is a Web site called "Jim's Computer Garage/Museum"
(different Jim) which contains some excellent color photos of various
DEC minicomputers at http://www.rdrop.com/~jimw/jcgm-min.shtml#Minis .
>From these photos, it is possible to identify the _Condor_ computer as
a PDP-8/e.
George Lucas' 1970 _THX 1138_ contains these shots of a rather large
System/360 installation (I count four CPU consoles):
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/thx4_small.jpg (12)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/thx4.jpg (179)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/thx5_small.jpg (14)
http://members.home.net/fehlinger/blinkenlights/thx5.jpg (207) .
Compare
http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/events/anniversaries/40th/images/ibm360_672/slide07.html
This is a contemporary 1970 computer installation, though the film is
supposedly set in the 25th Century (according to the laserdisc jacket;
I can't recall anyone in the film actually identifying the year).
There are other high-tech-looking venues used during the shooting of
this film, including the control room of what appears to be a railroad
or subway system (probably the BART system in San Francisco, whose
futuristic-looking trains also appear in the movie). IMO, the look of
this film remains compelling despite the anachronistic technology
(which includes close-up shots of Fortran code being spit out by a
lineprinter; yes, it's something of an anti-technology rant, but it's
an entertaining one).
According to the Jargon File entry at
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/blinkenlights.html ,
"blinkenlights" made something of a comeback in the real world in the
80's and 90's, though they no longer represent processor registers;
most often, they comprise the twinkling red and green status LEDs on
network equipment (unfortunately, where I work, the light show is kept
out of sight in a locked closet). Daniel Hillis' Connection Machine,
manufactured by Thinking Machines, Inc., came in for some mockery as a
result of the marketing decision made by that manufacturer to
incorporate a spectacular LED display representing the status of
individual processors in this massively parallel, multiprocessor
machine (see http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/example-tour.html ; click
on "Connection Machines"). The following quotation from TMI
literature appears in many locations on the Web as a piece of humor:
"One of the most attractive features of a Connection Machine is the
array of blinking lights on the faces of its cabinet." -- CM Paris
Ref. Manual, v6.0, p48. There is also a bit of gossip at the Ed
Thelen site (link just above) to the effect that the CM-5 had a
"customer switch" that would make the machine blink its LEDs to make
it look like it was working even when it wasn't doing anything useful.
In spite of the mockery this machine suffered on account of its
blinkenlights, I can think of no other real-world machine that
**looks** as much as though it ought to be hosting an AI:
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/MetaComp/Images/CM5_lg.jpg I'm not
aware of any movie that used one of these as a prop, unfortunately.
One last remark. The fondness that some people have for dinosaurs
from the blinkenlights era is proved by the lengths to which a group
of enthusiasts have gone to restore one of these old machines -- none
other than an IBM 1620. (see
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/example-tour.html ; click on "IBM 1620,
Restored"). "So everything we did is in red wires here, and the
problem was that this core memory in here disintegrated - it was 40
years old. So we designed and built a semiconductor replacement, that
you can see right here - and wired it in... Just about a month ago
[March 2000] ran the level zero diagnostic which means everything is
working on this - after 40 years." I'm sure there were tears in the
eyes of the old-timers when that moment arrived! See also the "IBM
1620 Restoration Mailing List Archive" at
http://hissa.nist.gov/mlists/ibm1620/ and the Java simulator (this is
too cool!) at http://www.jowsey.com/java/sim1620/ .
Cheers.
Jim F.
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