Stranger Things and the Amiga 1000
datagubbe.se
datagubbe.se
The Tandy 2000 in the show was shown with the Tandy VM-1 monochrome monitor option with tilt and swivel stand. However it's showing a color display -- in a VGA-like font. The actual Tandy 2000 font looked quite different, more like a Kaypro or MicroBee system font, and is available in the Old School PC Font Pack: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?tandy2k
Theoretically, showing a VGA font in text mode would have been possible on the 2000, as unlike the contemporary MDA or CGA, the Tandy 2000's video adapter supported font reprogramming. But hardly anyone did this because hardly anyone wrote software for the 2000.
However, the use to which it was put is period accurate. Despite being considerably more powerful than any IBM PC available through the mid-80s, and so being used as a CAD workstation and spreadsheet powerhouse (its peculiar system architecture meant it had a fast 8 MHz 80186, no 640k barrier, and 720k floppies to the PC's 360k), by 1987 (when season 4 is set) it was clear the machine was a flop and it would be discontinued the following year. Unsold stock would be converted to POS terminals for Radio Shack locations; before then they were available for a song and probably pressed into POS service by mom and pop shops on a budget -- like video stores.
Yes, we had one when I was growing up so I'm somewhat fond of this underdog machine. It has, among other things, the distinction of being the first machine I programmed Lisp on.
Then there are the egregious ones, like John Wick 2 and Kong: Skull Island, where they just drew green text in smooth antialiased modern fonts and called it a day.
There are exceptions: Jurassic Park, in 1993, featured a real UNIX system ("It's a UNIX system!"), a real SGI workstation with its GUI[0].
Modern online computers, aka the internet (with mouse and everything this time) made their debut in the mainstream "You've Got Mail" (1998).
As for Stranger Things, these are creative people, I guess instead of trying to be extremely accurate (and still get something wrong), they went for a credible yet not realistic way, featuring some easter-eggs in a post-modern fashion, so eventually geeks like us could scream: "Look! Iframes!!".
dont forget the iconic ST-506 MFM hard disk seeking sound in the background
That's not the business they're in... it's abt treating the mainstream to a continuous congratulation of their existing experience (ideas, beliefs, and perception) and gently mixing in images of modern life to soften the blow of industrialized life.
Could it in fact have been some kind of strangely configured Amiga generating that display, with some odd customizations?
What about that weird color palette, did they generate something full color, feed it to an component video monitor but leave the blue channel out, or something?
Or was the entire thing just fabricated on modern hardware? The C# and html copy/paste suggests at least some contact with 2020s tech.
Alternatively, they could have captured screenshots of the UI elements using an Amiga emulator and animated a video by hand to play on the screen, or built their own simulation out of the captured elements using HTML/CSS/JS (or maybe C#, given the code on the screen).
I would be very surprised if vintage hardware was used to generate any of it, unless some random crew member was an absolute Amiga fanatic. The gradients in the title bars in particular seem like something that would require modifying Workbench itself, i.e. 68k assembly hacking, whereas it would be easy to do in CSS.
I think the green look is a custom palette, vs. leaving one or more channels disconnected. There's red on the screen too. AFAIK Workbench doesn't let you set a non-white colour for the window border, so those would be yellow if e.g. blue were disconnected.
Amigas used to drive a lot of the background displays on film/TV sets in the 80s and 90s, so I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix actually dug up an Amiga monitor that supported external sync with the cameras and plugged whatever was generating the simulated Workbench into it.
[1] I tried filming the screen of my Amiga 500 with a VHS camcorder back in high school, and they were just slightly out of sync, so a black bar would slowly creep down the screen over and over on video. I assume it was the Amiga monitor running at exactly 60fps versus the camcorder at ~29.97fps.
Also, the URL structure and the use of things prefixed wm- makes me thing it was taken from the Wayback Machine.
I guess I need to add this to https://moviecode.tumblr.com/
https://www.avpgalaxy.net/forum/index.php?topic=45645.0
So Prometheus has Weyland Corp from 2012. AvP has Weyland Industries, which the folks on that forum think is supposed to be founded in the 80’s. So hypothetically there could be an AvP/Stranger Things crossover.
But I think a more likely explanation is that a character in the Stranger Things universe is a fan of the Aliens series, since the first two movies came out in ‘79 and ‘84. Hopefully the world will be sufficiently diverged from the real life timeline by the upside-down, and they will be spared the horrors of Alien 3.
I don't think this is an oversight. There's a limited amount of fonts that screams "computer" on TV, and the VGA font is one of them. Topaz ain't. I guess we're lucky that they stuck with the somewhat low resolution, or we'd have gotten the numero uno of FakeUI fonts: OCR-A
HTML happens a lot these days when you want to show the "inside" of a system, for obvious reasons, it's just the modern equivalent of assembly/hex editors, and the most likely "internal view" a contemporary user might actually have encountered. And, weirdly and sadly enough, it's about to get even more true.
Not sure what they did there, but its not actually a green screen. I think they changed the default colours to make it seem 'old school' so the audience can relate easily in spite of the innacuracy that the (relatively few) A1000 owners would pick up on.
I was mainly curious because I'd never seen an A1000 before, I started 16-bit with an A500, though overall technically I started with an 8-bit 32K Microbee because Dad insisted on something 'educational' over a C64.
I found the C# and HTML code amusing, in a way I think that scene is Stranger Things slightly more authentic version of CSI's creating a GUI in Visual Basic to track an IP adress. Plus they got to make a joke referencing the internet changing the world.
The channel was a huge amount of work because I did original research for each video and that became incompatible with Cloudflare!
I also remember the dicsussion in the movie at the time going on about georeferencing. Not saying that concept wasn't out there at the time, but it would have been miles from a 15 year old's fingertips.
A later one from season 1 had the 32-bit EFLAGS register layout on a whiteboard in the background, years before the 80386 came out.
That's why I don't watch any shows that have anything to do with "hacking", computers etc, because it feels cringe and makes me think if anything else is fake, then why should I bother ingesting it.
The answer is: all of it! 100% of Stranger Things is inaccurate, because it’s fiction. ;)
This is true for all subjects, not just computer hacking. This includes non-fiction documentaries too… there’s nothing you can watch anywhere that is “accurate”, except maybe live video feeds. There are always incorrect details.
Accuracy, of course, is not the primary goal of TV show producers. They like to slip in these somewhat period accurate-ish tidbits for the enjoyment of those of us looking closely at the tangential details, but the Amiga in the show has no bearing on the story, it’s just a prop. I’m sure if you looked as closely at all the other props, you’d notice many that are inaccurate for the time & location: lamps, furniture, clothes, cars, houses, etc. It’s not possible to shoot a large production and get every single detail (and it would be unaffordably expensive to even get very close.) To me, going to the trouble of recreating the Amiga screen seems like a lot of effort to put into a prop.
So here’s a question for you: would you rather they used fictional computer brands and fictional screen shots? Would that make it more watchable for you? Can you watch computer sci-fi when it’s not trying to include period props, like Tron, for example? I do have my own line for where inaccuracies will pull me out of a show and prevent me from suspending disbelief, but generally as a computer nerd who lived through the 80s, I like a lot of the ‘hacking’ pop culture, even when it’s extremely cringe (looking at you, “Hackers”).