Vintage computers in movies

At 03:18 PM 12/19/00 -0500, Charles E. Fox wrote: Could you add Probably right after they stop adding gratuitous sounds and inaccurate functions to computers: dot-matrix printer sounds, beeps and boops that would drive you nuts if the damn machine actually made that sound all the time, slow-motion text display, fonts larger than your mouse, etc. I seem to remember a Roger Ebert column on the topic. In short, he dreamed of the day when movie-makers realized that most people have seen a real computer and know how they operate, and they'd be portrayed as such on the screen. Why all the goofy fakery? * Just this morning on Sesame Street, Alan (who took over Mr. Hooper's store a few years back, in case you haven't been watching) was helping Baby Bear send a message to his poetry friends on a web site - and the skit confused the notion of an e-mail address and a web site address. My kid was wandering around adding "dot com" to things when he was two, and I hadn't even let him play at the computer for any appreciable amount of time. Now at 5, he sees something new and wants to know if it has a web site. - John * I'll tell you why they look fake... it's easier to fake something completely unrealistic than it is to make something look "right". Godzilla vs. Jurassic Park, for example. Although I think a lot of movies could handle their PC screen scenes with a little Visual Basic and a macro recorder, so much of what you see (in terms of GUI screen shots) is completely recreated on some other computer or OS, ready for replay, replay, replay at a moment's notice if a human needs to interact with it.