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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Can we just appreciate that someone did write that program for the Atari palmtop 30 years ago just so it would appear for 5 seconds in a movie. Crazy.

I wonder how the hiring for that position go? "Our movie studio is looking for a programmer to code a sequence that simulates PIN cracking on an Atari which will look cool and hackery on screen."

Either way, that coder did a stellar job in making it look really legit vs the shitty hacking sequences that followed in movies of the early '00 where you could hack the DoD by typing on the keyboard random words really fast or assembling some 3D shapes on an SGI machine to break encryption.

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Big budget films (and TV series) can spend an incredible amount of effort and money on detail that most people won't notice or appreciate (or sometimes even makes it into the final cut). Of course, as you say, they can do dumb stuff too.

Which, depending upon your perspective, is an attention to detail that makes the film better even if most people don't consciously notice it or it's a symptom of why studio films can be astonishingly expensive to make.

Especially in T2:

>My CPU is a neural-net processor, a learning computer.

Costly tech for a movie, but well worth it.

Well, there's that line, which is brilliant, and then there's the fact that he clearly runs on a 6502, soooooo.....

Just like Bender! https://i.redd.it/e5ocvyizvk521.png

Futurama is full of obscure geek references, I wonder whether this is a jab at T2.

More of a tongue-in-cheek reference to the reoccurring joke that bender wants to kill all humans, except for his pet Fry.

You can indeed simulate a neural net on a 6502. Not enough nodes to model a T-800, but...

I have a friend who does graphic and video design. He gets jobs occasionally (via several layers of subcontracting) for "alien operating system and interface video" and the like, which have appeared in a few movies. He showed me the brief for one once, and it was pretty interesting. A while different kind of design work than what I'm used to seeing.

Yeah, I have a friend from art school who has created fake posters and interfaces, etc for shows like Law and Order: SVU and I Am Legend (he created the Batman vs Superman poster in times square!). Cool job, but it sounds like it's feast or famine sometimes.

Yes, working with Hollywood sucks. Either they're in development and their credit cards bounce, or they're in production and they want a new feature yesterday.

I wonder what he would charge to make a DS9 style interface... :)

It's not crazy: You've just summarised filmmaking.

Costumes, sets, special effects, props, etc. all are like that. Specialised and skilled people spending a lot of time and effort for things that may or may not get a lot of screen time.

But even a short screen time can be very important for the film and have a lasting effect. Example: That very program.

Wasn't it an Atari Portfolio? If memory serves, it had a mostly functional MS-DOS, so writing a program for it was likely not an arduous task. That being said, rewatching those scenes, it was a striking little device for its day and ahead of its time.

I remember post credits narration of a 1990s Dorling Kindersly video about a black car morph into an insect (both beetle) and she said this took 3 weeks just for a 3 second animation.

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