Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hamburglar 26 days ago
No Cray appearances? Surprising.
4 comments

Jurassic Park had a Thinking Machines CM-5.

https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=15

"The lights flash just like they do normally, although it's hard to understand why a theme park needs a supercomputer."

:D

On the 'help' page, the Cray-like machine from the film Sneakers is listed under "Honourable mentions":

https://www.starringthecomputer.com/help.html

From the site:

> The following films do not appear on the site because I believe the computers they feature are mock ups and therefore do not qualify.

That seems like an odd distinction if it's clearly portraying a Cray. It's not like we have any proof that e.g. the Commodore 64 used in Mr. Robot was the real deal.
Huh. I always thought that there was a Cray in Wargames.
It looks spiritually similar to a CM-1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine), but I think WOPR predates the Connection Machine. Still, watching Wargames and seeing WOPR always reminds me of a story my college hardware prof told about one of the early Connection Machines - that the LEDs were a busy signal, one for each processor. Supposedly there wasn’t enough power to have them all on at the same time, and they discovered it debugging someone’s parallel algorithm that appeared to crash the machine when, as they finally figured out, the algorithm at one point used all the processors simultaneously.