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DEC PDP-8/E in The Tower (1985)

The PDP-8 is the building's main computer system.

Importance: ****
The PDP-8 tries to wrest control of the building from Lola by asserting a fail-safe condition, but Lola overrides this.

Realism: **
Visibility: ***

Comments:

Name

Comment


Year of feature (shown above)


Christian G.

It is feasible that a PDP-8/E could be used to run a building's systems. Then again I've never seen this film so I couldn't tell how feasible it might be. But some PDP-8/E systems were used in conjunction with the simplistic PDP-14 industrial control computer in a variety of process control situations. However, I do see one major flaw in on the PDP-8/E of this movie, namely that there are too many disk drives (which appear to be RK05 drives); if I remember my OMNIBUS modules correctly, the RK8E controller only allowed *FOUR* RK05 drives on the controller, not the five of shown in this system.
2011-03-29 07:52


Stephen Kallis, Jr.

The 'CONDOR' computer was programmed in Digital's FOCAL interpreter to simulate language translation. The translation shown in the opening shots was from an original text in Chinese.
2012-12-27 15:02