I mess around with writing sometimes and I was just gazing at some pics of a PDP-8 – so gorgeous, and clearly the real world inspiration for all the “panel of blinking lights” computers we watched in 70s-80s SF. Got me wondering – we’ve had way too many shows now dealing with modern digital culture (hello Silicon Valley). There’s been some attempts to tell stories from the early days of micro computers (Halt And Catch Fire for instance), and that makes sense, given that those are the machines that many GenX played with at home or at school. But Hollywood’s version of Silicon Valley – Silvercon Valley? – has yet to celebrate the Minicomputer and Mainframe eras in a real way. They have done a bit of deep diving into the 50s, but only in the form of standard issue Genius Porn where the computer operators who broke wartime codes were like Harry Potter characters or something, with modern social causes overlaid as a historical corrective of sorts, and I somewhat doubt that Turing is any happier for the fact that the world no longer cares that he was gay, but remains unable to grasp the awesome stuff he did do. He’s not here for it. Grim thoughts aside, these PDP-8s and the people who worked with them daily deserve a story, complete with looooots of pornographic shots of the machines themselves. Love stories that begin by someone bumping their true love’s pile of punchcards into a game of ’52 pickup that ends with lurid shots of stacks of cards being sucked into the reader. Anyways, the best story would heroize someone real from the era. I know a lot of stories but cannot really find the one that really deserves someone having a go at making it into a script set in that gorgeous era of earthtoned data. What do you think, HN?
Story Published at: November 21, 2022 at 06:46PM
Story Published at: November 21, 2022 at 06:46PM