The 1985 Bond movie A View to a Kill features some top-notch nerdery, with James and Stacey Sutton poring over seismic reports on an Apple IIc—a blatantly boring data McGuffin made fascinating by the high-tech presentation on Apple's perfect pseudo-portable computer. Mac Piantoni fastidiously recreated the app they used and published it on GitHub.
There's nothing cooler than a computer in a movie, and 1985's A View To A Kill has a particularly cool Apple IIc. Join me as I forge this Faberge bit by bit, byte by byte. In this video I meticulously reverse engineer the application from the movie and recreate it on my Apple IIc using Applesoft BASIC and a variety of development tricks. No one was asking, but I sure delivered.
Here's Max's detailed report on the project, embedded below.
My favorite examples of 1980s computer-UI magic are the vectorbeam big boards from 1983's WarGames. They were generated by computer, but not shot live. Quite the opposite, in fact! The process was extremely slow.
"Graphics on the large NORAD war room screens were rendered in advance by an HP 9845C desktop computer running BASIC. In 1982 the 9845C was comprised of a base with built-in keyboard and a 14" color monitor that mounted on top. Cost of a 9845C was about $90,000 (inflation-adjusted) and the entire "desktop" computer weighed about 100 pounds. The computer's resolution was not good enough to project on a large screen or to be filmed from directly, so a high-resolution monochromatic display was connected. The images were filmed from the display, one frame at a time, one color at a time, using filters for red, green, and blue. The process took about 1 minute per frame of film."
Before:
💻 Gallery of computer interfaces from science fiction movies
💻 Appearances of home computers in movies and TV shows
💻 Behind the Screens: what the computer code seen in movies and TV shows actually does
