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From: dca@kesmai.COM (David C. Albrecht)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,rec.arts.movies
Subject: Re: A minor point
Message-ID: <231@kesmai.COM>
Date: 21 Sep 89 21:35:27 GMT
References: <766@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca>
Organization: Kesmai Corporation, Charlottesville, VA
Lines: 21

> In <1989Sep18.090550.2459@agate.berkeley.edu>, pete@violet.berkeley.edu (Pete Goodeve) writes:
>What amused me even more -- and annoyed me intensely at the same time --
>was Ebert's "minor point" that one of the many bad features of the movie
>was that the computer display "didn't look like any REAL computer that ever
>existed."  He was sure that they were simply "advertising type"

Well, I missed the screen shot and only saw the computer from the side.
The point I thought Ebert was trying to make was that real computer
applications don't look the way people display them in movies.  How
many movies have you seen where 'crackers' break into a remote machine and
it starts spewing 3-d vector graphics onto the screen, uh huh.  It's not
really a question of whether the machine is capable of producing such
results its a question of whether any likely application would have such
output.  I haven't seen the movie but I suspect it is highly unlikely that
the 'hero' was generating animations, more likely animations were used to
give more pizazz to what most likely been a much more static looking
program.  In effect, flashy advertising illustrations (albeit Amiga
generated) are substituted for what would be a reasonable computer
interface.  All speculation mind you, as I said I haven't seen the movie.

David Albrecht