Why didn't Peter just walk away while his computer was shutting down?

For screen tension.

Way back in the olden days computers didn't turn off automatically after closing all the running programs. You would have to close all the running programs and then turn it off manually..

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What I've always wondered about is why some of the computer screenshots make it look like they're using a Mac, while in other screenshots, it looks like they're using a DOS-based PC.

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We have clearance, Clarence.
Roger, Roger. What's our vector, Victor?

Uh... cause it wouldn't have been as funny? Lots of scenes in this movie were just gags, similar to the scene where he unscrews and pushes over his wall. To me it isn't supposed to hang together in any logical way. Part of why I liked it.

None of the work would have been saved. They didn't have a network there, it had to be saved to floppy disk which is how people worked in those days.

What is interesting is that he didn't just ask Peter to come in that weekend, his supervisor was there too apparently because he kept calling Peter at his apartment.

I was kinda annoyed by this too, why not just turn the screen off? It was already shutting down by itself, there was no point in waiting.

For the same reason you'd want to wait today. Have you ever went to shut down you PC, left and found out not only did it not shut down, but it hadn't even gone to the password lock screen. Imagine that happening on a computer with highly sensitive data.

There have been some partially good answers, and a lot of ignorance, many misunderstandings, mistakes, and simply wrong knowledge or lies about computer technology.

First of all, nothing was saved on FLOPPIES necessarily, despite some clueless individual claiming something like this in a comment.

Hard Disks have existed since 1956.

Yes, around mid-FIFTIES was the time, when hard disks were already invented.

That's around thirty-three years prior to 1999.

They were VERY common in office-PCs even in 1989, let alone 1999!

Get your facts straight, man!

But let me give some pointers that might enlighten the issue.

There was one post, which quite correctly identified one part of the problem; you couldn't leave the computer, because not all computers could shut down themselves even if the operating system knew how to quit AFTER YOU HAVE SAVED THE FILES, FIRST.

So, in any case, you had to wait, before you could even ask the operating system to shut down, and when you get to the DOS prompt or a "The computer can now be safely turned off"-screen, you could then turn off the computer without harming the system or damaging the HARD DRIVE.

Now, we can start talking about things like VIRTUAL MEMORY.

Does anyone here know, how virtual memory works? Anyone? Anyone?

Virtual Memory utiliizes hard disk as a 'temporary storage space' for things that do not fit in the memory, or are used so rarely that they can be at least partially kept there (it's really a bit more complicated than this, but this should suffice as a superficial, roundabout explanation). It's only when you suddenly need those things, that the hard drive has to be running very hard to SWAP those things in the memory with things that are in the hard drive, and vice versa.

The less memory the computer has, the slower things become, because then the operating system has to use more and more virtual memory - which means, utilize the hard disk more.

You can notice this if you open many modern, bloated programs, like 'Opera', in multiple tabs, etc. You can have gigabytes of memory, but at some point, you will reach the limit, and things become slow, the hard drive LED will be shining constantly, and you can hear the hard drive working very hard to swap so much data back and forth.

Now, if you add a "FILE SAVING" procedure (or any kind of hard drive utilizing process that uses big files, or lots of small files, or any other combination that simply takes a long time to process in any case - especially saving something to the hard disk -- this is the slowest thing a hard drive can do) to this mix, it will of course make things CRAWL, because it not only has to try to keep the operating system and the bloated programs running by over-utilizing the virtual memory, but it has to SIMULTANEOUSLY arrange the file saving (or other hard-drive-utilizing procedure) to the specific place in the hard drive.

While it's doing that, it's also trying to fetch data from another place in the hard disk, AND trying to save some other data yet elsewhere on the same (?) hard disk. Even if it's a different hard disk or partition, it can still make the operating system crawl simply because there are too many tasks to perform, and because PCs are STILL slowed down by the hard drives (and this was even more true in the nineties, and even more true in the eighties, and so on).

There is of course the reason that you couldn't just leave the computer, because everything is in your responsibility, you have to protect not only our own computer privacy, but also probably have contractually agreed not to reveal your data to anyone, who isn't cleared to have it. There could always be spies from other corporations, headhunters, etc. Corporate Espionage is very real.

So he had to make sure everything is saved, AND that the computer is properly turned off after everything is saved. He couldn't just walk away - any visitor could have otherwise just started using that computer and potentially risked the future of the corporation.

About the Mac/PC-stuff - incredibly silly gimmick, that SHOULD NOT have been used, in my opinion. It kills the immersion, destroys the realism and makes this a cartoon.

Although you can emulate a Mac on a PC, or even nowadays run MacOS on a PC, and run Windows on a Mac, and so forth - this was not all that feasible in 1999 (with Amiga, it was easy to run an emulated Mac faster than a real mac, due to the same CPU, except that it was possible to get an enhanced version of that CPU architecture for the Amiga, that wasn't available for the Mac - namely, Motorola 68060 CPU).

So, they should have either shown people using Macs, or people using PCs. Even if it meant that some people had a Mac in the office, and others had a PC (not completely unheard of, but usually the different computers had very specific, designated tasks, when that happens, like using Macs for creating layout, video editing, or some other type of art/visual stuff, while using PCs for accounting, rendering, CPU-intensive tasks and more general stuff).

But generally speaking, that's how it was in 1999; you just HAD to wait. If you turned off the computer before the files are completely saved, you would most likely have damaged the hard drive permanently, and most definitely lost your files you were trying to save. It would have been really stupid.

But the real point of this scene is not to portray technical accuracy anyway. It's whole idea is to recreate the scenario that pretty much all computer users in that year had been overly familiar with; HUMAN HAVING TO WAIT FOR A COMPUTER.

It's funny, it's ironic, it's irritating, it's bloody annoying - but it's very, very real. It's perhaps corny and comedic, it's probably unbelievably stupid, but humans really have to wait for machines a lot, even these days.

THAT was what that scene was about. When you have to wait for a computer, although you are supposed to already be somewhere else, it burns to your memory as something very painful - and when you see this scene, it brings all that pain back, it brings it back to life.

In that sense, that scene is absolutely brilliant.