My Code Was in the Original Terminator Movie | Hacker News Reader

My Code Was in the Original Terminator Movie

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279 pointsfortran7746 comments

Other scenes have ASM from an Apple II. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Lifeandhealth/Pix...

I break all those down in my video on The Terminator and its code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRnnjoiSV-U It's all from Nibble Magazine.

Epic, John!

Slightly disappointed that this wasn't the 6502 assembly listings we saw in the classic "Termovision" shots from the first movie ;)

Indeed! Came here to say the same thing. That code [0] was via Nibble Magazine, which was pretty great back in the day.

[0] https://www.pagetable.com/?p=64

Very kind of Skynet to include the English-language comments in the binary in case somebody needs to step through it in a debugger.

The Skynrt was probably all dreamt together in an adversial neural network.

Sky net may have needed help from humans to maintain itself, like the Stephen King short story “Trucks”, where the eponymous living trucks force humans to refuel them

At least the movie Sneakers was serious about the math: http://world.std.com/~reinhold/math/sneakers.adleman.html

That's close to "Hello World" in COBOL. Read a number and add it.

Haha was wondering if I could try to make sense of it... couldn't, saw your post, decided to take another look at the origin.

For anyone interested it sums all integers from 1 to 1000. Written as a benchmark for different languages.

Maybe the terminator was running a benchmark in those scenes :P

Power-On-Self-Test (POST) calibration loop or training.

Not as far fetched. RDRAM does something similar when it comes online: it has to "train" the physical link every time the system is booted by generating bogus traffic and timing it (and can also retrain on certain errors). Complicated stuff, RDRAM. Also, anything with a differential pair may employ training like this.

As I type this, I am -literally- in the process of writing a self-timing loop using a binary increase of iterations to find average execution time plateau.

Another area is real-time profiling on cpus with stepping support - I run a loop like that every 2-3 sec to figure out the actual Instructions Per Second at current stepping. Applicable both to desktop and mobile CPUs nowadays.

So it's true: when he's not killing people, the original Terminator processes New Jersey unemployment insurance applications.

No need to repeat yourself

Oblig-

https://nmap.org/movies/

I was going to link to this on YouTube since I remember watching it for free, but it seems they stopped providing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fN82upbGPo

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/11/youtube-full-movies-free-a...

I've seen this website used in a bunch of TV shows these past few years: http://www.hackertyper.com/

According to `git blame` Alexey Dobriyan wrote most of that file so congrats Alexey on your unexpected career as a TV prop guy!

So Skynet was written in COBOL. Explains why it was so angry, I guess.

HN comments rarely make me laugh out loud, thank you :)

They had to send the Terminator back in time to circumvent Y2K

If you're looking for a young guy working in cobol in the y2k vicinity, that was me (19 at the time). not only I added 2 more digits to some microfocus app, I also saved the world :) My first professional gig was with cobol, and it was almost cool.

We salute you. Thanks for saving the world; to all greater y2k saveaists. What an unseen fix, you guys, all you y2k fixers, I mean, really did it. Thanks man(s).

man s might also mean women etc whatever all the new forms of people and identities goes on. We salute everyone.

I hope that's on your resume as "Heroic Engineer - Saves the world every day by staving off Y2K"

Thanks for sharing. Cool to hear from someone who was actually working on that.

Someone calls Dyson, there's a shortage of COBOL experts I've heard

Microsoft COBOL-80, specifically, per the magazine article.

Wow, the Terminator was powered by a "Hello World" COBOL application?

Think what it could do with some real code behind it!

Think what it could have done had it used PL/I-80, the immediately preceding listing in the magazine article, which benchmarked faster.

Or indeed, per the magazine benchmark test results, BASIC. (-:

So T-800 was written in Cobol? :/

Happy ending to my YouTube video on where all the code came from in The Terminator. I tracked down the author of one piece and emailed him out of the blue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRnnjoiSV-U

Here's the code: https://gist.github.com/jgrahamc/9a90399f39926857b19e8635b30...

amazing work!

And the magazine article (mentioned in the Twitter thread - "Dr digital" page 98 - 73 magazine 1984):

https://archive.org/details/73-magazine-1984-05/page/n97/mod...

The online version is pretty much unreadable for me on Firefox/mobile, but the Pdf is ok:

https://archive.org/download/73-magazine-1984-05/05_May_1984...

Ed: corrected link. The article itself would be a great hn submission - a comparison of time (writing+execution) of a simple program in basic, Pascal and cobol..

Came to say the same thing. Fascinating look into a time machine—what problems are we still wrestling with and what celebrated innovations then do we see as problematic legacies now (e.g., when a language allows 1 + ‘1’ to equal 2)? Very fun read.

So fricking cool. I’m surprised that after all these years, no one told him before this.

> I remember seeing the movie and thinking "HA! Robots from the future use COBOL". Sadly, this may turn out to be true.

Turns out COBOL was a failsafe against the robot apocalypse

What a great find! I guess back then, they didn't think too much about the "rights" for a fragment of code lifted from a magazine. I don't think movie studios would do this today.

Wanna bet? Read my Tumblr: https://moviecode.tumblr.com/ or follow my channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzOc0EEdwWAlnwrWV-7sDbg

i looked at your tumblr and dont see any discussion of copyrights or attribution. I thought that's what parent was talking about. Maybe i missed it on your site -- i didn't read the entire blog.

Please don't use multiple accounts to comment on or vote for your own posts. You succeeded in getting this perfectly good submission buried by our software. I had to manually restore it.

Did the IPs match or something? How did you know it was multiple accounts?

Unfortunately I can't talk about the details of that without making it easier for people to break the rules. Sorry to disappoint.

You should make a biography about what it took [you] to moderate HN once this site blows over, then you can just spill anything, man. Insert Deity; I guess this is hard work; or some wayfaring good algorithms.

Thanks man. I'll troll less, knowing how much dung (huh) you're in daily.

Please write the tricks once HN goes under or whatever.

I appreciate that! also, I don't think I've seen that inflection of dang before.

It would be nice if HN continued beyond all of us, though. Sounds grandiose and dumb, but why not? There's already a rich archive (a dozen years' worth and counting) and the site has certain properties that prevent it from growing too much.

Maybe eventually we (or our successors) will come up with an anti-abuse system that makes the current one obsolete and then we can publish the old one and HN can have a retro thread about it, like about 1980s Lisp AI programs.

> a retro thread about it, like about 1980s Lisp AI programs

LOL. Be careful what you wish for...

HR: tell me about the most exciting project you did. Me, Senior Developer in Cyberdine: actually, T-800, despite of our customer insisted on using Cobol

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