Movies: irritating technical incongruities

Especially for 'techies'.

Scanning through the channels this AM, I came across the 2010, the sequel to 2001 A space odyssey.

And I was struck by the use of {obviously} CRT displays on so-called 'state of art' computers. This isnt the first time this has happened, it's common, but not in a movie that supposedly took so serious an approach to technology, indeed 2001 showed them and the fact is noted in 2010 'Goofs' section in IMDB.

The movie was made in '84 and at the time it was released, I was using a prototype portable terminal, built exactly like current laptops using a plasma display, though its scan was only suitable for character/line display of 80 {9x7}chars by 25 lines. As I was NOT working for a Tech product company, but Lexis, an on-line legal data firm, that means the stuff was commercially available. We ultimately built about 250 of these 'laptops', in the mid eighties, at a cost of 3000 per. We also had been using small ink-jet printers since 1980, long before they ever appeared on store shelves, though.


The POINT is that 2001 used flat-panels and it was made while the flat panel was a lab prototype. And it would have been easy to mimic a flat panel with a CRT by merely using a square corner mask over the CRT.

OTOH, the mid-70's TV series Space: 1999 used 'caller identifying ring-tones' for communications, something I think they extrapolated from Star Trek. But you notice that futuristic movies made in the eighties seldom hit on the ubiquitous cell-phone... something I think is amazing. Reality is sometimes eye-opening.

Also interesting that none in the script writing seemed to care about the effect on the environment of having TWO SUNS!!!!