The Most Wonderfully Ridiculous Movie Computers of All Time

From: Jason McBrien <jbmcb1 at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Re: The Most Wonderfully Ridiculous Movie Computers of All Time http://www.starringthecomputer.com/feature.html?f=50 Weird analysis about the VAX 780 in Seven - I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that a police department would still be using one in the mid-90's. The college I went to was still chugging along on an old Amdahl 370-clone in the same time period - as the primary mail server and host for various licensed apps (mainly SPSS) I have NO difficulty believing municipal departments would hang on to old gear as long as it would stay reasonably reliable. And, there is even STILL no shortage of VAX-11/780 parts at the brokers, if you know how to run the diags and swap boards. You could even repair the machine at the chip level with a soldering iron, solder sucker and dikes. There are pretty much NO custom parts in the entire machine except the fixed microcode fuseible PROMS, the LSI-11 and the inductors in the power supply modules. Given IT wasn't the hot cost center it is today, I'd imagine most police departments would be loathe to shell out for an upgrade to something that still probably worked just fine. Now, why the director put that thing the precinct room is another question. Artistic license? Now, that is VERY funny! Anyone who has ever walked behind a running 780 with a handful of papers at mid-thigh level knows what those cooling blowers will do! I can imagine the whole room being filled with whirling sheaves of paper! For those who don't know the 780 as well as I do (I was sysadmin on two of them, and also did a lot of hardware hacking and interfacing on them) they had 3 one-half Hp (I think) centrifugal blowers that sucked air down through the card cage and blew it out the back of the cabinet through 3 fairly small vents. The air shot out at at least 50 MPH, probably more. The 780 has a card cage that ran the entire length of the ~5' long cabinet, CPU at the left, memory in the middle and I/O sections at the right, IIRC. (Hmmm, have a vague recollection maybe the memory was at the left....) Power supply boxes were below the logic cards, blowers below that, and LSI-11 and it's floppy drive at the bottom left. Jon