MovieChat Forums > For Your Eyes Only (1981) Discussion > Let me get this straight ...

Let me get this straight ...

posted 14 years ago by ozmaemail
6 replies | jump to latest

You can control all of Britain's nuclear subs with a chunky keyboard but if you want to make a composite sketch of a suspect you need a computer the size of a walk-in closet?

[–] Whizzleteats33 14 years ago

Yes.

[–] gunforanarm 13 years ago

Best possible answer!

[–] gerard-21 13 years ago

Apparently the OP thinks a MacGuffin is something you eat for breakfast.

[–] gunforanarm 13 years ago

My favorite is the sausage MacGuffin with cheese.

[–] alcockell 12 years ago

That would have been accurate at the time - consider it was just the warhead control side of the nuc sub issue.

Typical CAD/CAM workstations of the time would have been stuff like DEC VAX-11/780s, which would have had two displays (one a hi-res display, the other a text terminal), disk pack drives would have been common back then (didn't Moore load a 4-platter disk pack? (from memory - I don't have a copy of the film to hand), and there would have been a tractor-fed impact printer as seen.

Being a minicomputer, you would have a lot of kit and it would be a specific installation.

Looks like they were running Identigraph on something along those lines.

And yes - that would have been single-user. Consider that Tron was rendered on a Cray supercomputer...

[–] plexus61 10 years ago

Those big white HDDs were of 5MB (yes, five megabytes) capacity, IIRC.