Computers on TV
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So... I was watching Hawaii 5-0 the other day... the original good version.
In an episode from 1972 they using their "computer" to retrieve in real time images of various important files (receipts, photos, pay records, etc..)
So pretty Smart™ for 1972 Cop Show ... they figured computers would access images from all over.
But to search them, they sat in a conference room and basically watched a slide show... they could ask the operator for various things, but then they just kind of eyeballed what went up on screen...
Anybody else seen any oddly prescient or weirdly out-of-place use of computers on TV or movies?
Anything including the initials C, I, or S doesn't count. ;)
For additional ForumPOINTZZ:
the episode's featured villain: Johnny Manoa
AKA: Kang
http://www.startrek.com/uploads/assets/articles/92e7f9ea503373206d51b8aebb30ba860b5c5fab.png
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Frist HAL 9000
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Anybody else seen any oddly prescient or weirdly out-of-place use of computers on TV or movies?
I always thought War Games did an excellent job of portraying computers (and various hackerstuffz) at the time it was filmed. The major problem was the convention of having the computers always wired up to a speech synthesizer so the Joshua program could "talk" to the actors. But that was a minor quibble.
The legend is it did such a good job of showing the (classified at the time) NORAD command center that the military briefly investigated the movie production to find out if they had a leak. (The same happened with Doctor Strangelove and its B-52 cockpit, which was also still classified at the time of the movie being made.)
Contrast that to Tron where a laser could "digitize" a person into a computer, where programs were dudes in weird clothes walking around. (Although it leaves the whole "the computer world was a hallucination" thing a possibility, at least.)
Frist HAL 9000
What about HAL 9000?
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As a kid, I remember watching Automan...
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(The same happened with Doctor Strangelove and its B-52 cockpit, which was also still classified at the time of the movie being made.)
Adding to the irony of George C. Scott screaming "BUT HE'LL SEE THE BIG BOARD!!"
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Adding to the irony of George C. Scott screaming "BUT HE'LL SEE THE BIG BOARD!!"
The situation room in the movie was nothing like the real one.
But Ronald Reagan re-modeled it to resemble the version in the film, because he liked the film so much.
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The situation room in the movie was nothing like the real one.
But.... I hope they had a Big Board.
NASA had a big board... the Pentagon should have had one too.
Filed under: that is how things work - they have an ice-free Pacific deepwater port, so we should too...
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NASA had a big board... the Pentagon should have had one too.
We must not allow a big board gap!
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But to search them, they sat in a conference room and basically watched a slide show... they could ask the operator for various things, but then they just kind of eyeballed what went up on screen...
Sure it wasn't a microfiche? That's how those work(ed).
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The major problem was the convention of having the computers always wired up to a speech synthesizer so the Joshua program could "talk" to the actors. But that was a minor quibble.
FWIW, at that point in time, you could build a speech synth capable of that kind of robotic reading for like $25. I'd bought the parts and had half-way built one.
Damn. Even 30+ years later I can remember the chip's part number: the SP0256-AL2. You could built a synth out of one of those and a handful of capacitors and a crystal or two, on a breadboard.
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You are point-missing.
I don't know why I bother to make points.
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I don't know why I bother to make points.
I thought it was so you could troll people. But since you aren't able to understand, I'll explain it: I was suggesting that your "problem" might not have been as much as you thought, because the ability to do voice synthesis was cheap even in the 80s.
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Frist HAL 9000
Hm...Amazon should make that an alternate casing (and voice) for the Echo.
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I was suggesting that your "problem" might not have been as much as you thought, because the ability to do voice synthesis was cheap even in the 80s.
You think it's unrealistic because it's expensive and not, say, because it's installed on the loudspeaker system at NORAD?
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I'm not the one who thinks it's expensive or even necessarily unrealistic, bright eyes, because if you could've afforded an Altair 8800, you could've bought the parts at Radio Shack to build the speech synthesis.
Also, I never expect movies to be realistic about the military, the police, or a whole host of other topics, because I don't think more than one or two movie script writers have ever had anything to do with those fields, so they just shamelessly make shit up.
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Sure it wasn't a microfiche? That's how those work(ed).
Nope - they kept tossing around the word "computer"... and hinted at automated search. It was very CSI before CSI.
But the microfiche thing... hmmm.... I had forgotten about those (remembered scrolled film, but not the fiche...)
When I was in elementary school we had this widget that read a magnetically striped card that was more or less punchcard size - and "read" words or phrases...
I wonder if somebody built a microfiche system that had search tags encoded on a mag-stripe on the cards.
Related - in a way:
Skip past the the hyperloop hype (
)The Hyperloop Will Be Only the Latest Innovation That's Pretty Much a Series of Tubes
The idea of using pneumatics to send objects has been around for ages. But people?
The US Post Office was apparently delivering over 6 Million letters per day in Manhattan via pneumatic tubes. People could actually use it like IM.
see also: debate on High Speed Rail vs. Air Travel; and Star-Topologies
Also: emojii preview y u no view?
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Picture of HAL
TCDC
Unlike some thread creators I do not set "rules" for a thread ;)
... but I was going to "Disallow/FAIL" on HAL...
I mean srsly? It's a hyper futuristic movie in SPACE - of course there's a cool computer! Not unexpected at all!
Upon further review... the unexpected part would be HAL's own version of Original Sin...
Does our pre-occupation with keeping computers working predictably and deterministically prevent us from getting to actual AI?
:canofworms.dmp:I'll set one "Rule"... one round of actual "positive" opinions prior to any pre-emptive attacks or critique's or trolling...
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Generally related, but I was pleased to see that finally it's possible/allowed to show real software on TV. I think it was a recent episode of True Detective where the guy actually used Google to search for something instead of mynetsearch or whatever GUI someone knocked up.
Then I started watching The Killing, where incoming phone calls show a completely white screen with the person's name in the middle...
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Yes
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Mobile Wikipedia link
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Yep, I make it up as I go along. Can't get more artificial than that.
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Gotta love the part in Batman Returns (1992) where Batman manages to scratch/rewind an audio CD with his fingers directly on the CD, just like a DJ might do with vinyl record on a turntable!
Then they actually invented CDJ's 10-15 years later that let you do that (still without physically touching the CD, obviously)
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Please enlighten me; what's the problem with that? I'm on mobile, I include a courtesy link. I'm not going to edit the link too for you.
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scratch/rewind an audio CD with his fingers directly on the CD, just like a DJ might do with vinyl record on a turntable!
My friends were amazed that I was able to stop the disc in the discman ,and the audio kept playing (a few years later - anti skip technology)
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... but I was going to "Disallow/FAIL" on HAL...
I mean srsly? It's a hyper futuristic movie in SPACE - of course there's a cool computer! Not unexpected at all!
If someone considering himself cool would do a remake of 2001 now, HAL would probably be called Zookd instead.
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Anybody else seen any oddly prescient or weirdly out-of-place use of computers on TV or movies?
I always have to chuckle when I watch the new 5-0. When doing a search on their mobile, the camera always zooms in to show the (sponsored) search engine called Bing.
I mean, I never saw anybody in real life using Bing. Except maybe when searching on their Zune.
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"Siri. Find Wo Fat"
but I guess it would be hard to stretch that out to a 46 or 50 minute episode, wouldn't it?
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##Source Code in TV and FilmsSource Code in TV and Films
Images of the computer code appearing in TV and films and what they really are. See...
###Images of the computer code appearing in TV and films and what they really are.
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I never saw anybody in real life using Bing.
I'm pretty sure I've used it a few times, accidentally, on fresh installs of Windows (haven't installed Chrome yet, nor changed IE's defaults).
Type search term. Wait, what's this junk? Change IE's settings. Search again. That's better.
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I wonder what
%¥is supposed to do in thatprintfformat string.
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¥is the path separator on Japanese Windows (or on the Japanese code page), so I assume it's the character used on Japanese systems in general whenever you would use\on Western ones.
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I wonder what %¥ is supposed to do in that printf format string.
Local adaptation in the C library to support some special local format? Vendors do some weird shit…
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AH...
SE Laingood anime. weird as fxxx but good.
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I'm guessing that picture is from an anime. Instead of giving you a backslash, you get the ￥ symbol.
You can easily reproduce with putting the Japanese IME on windows and hitting \ key.So my question building off @HardwareGeek is, what language uses %\ to mean something?
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Automan - Wikipedia
