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Stranger Things and the Amiga 1000
- abruzzi 4y agowell, if you want to get pedantic, the image referenced by the html in the background window is a png file--png's I belive came out in the late 90's. And the image name clearly references "weyland" the linux windowing system that came out way later than that. 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.
- bee_rider 4y agoThe X replacement is Wayland. Weyland is the company in Alien. Although it looks like Weyland in the Aliens franchise isn’t founded until 2012 so I guess there isn’t any crossover potential there. It is probably just an in-joke.
- prpl 4y agoalso https
- martyvis 4y agoWell yeah, and while the original article does reference the HTML, it in itself wasn't defined by TBL until 1993.
- cesaref 4y agoAmiga programming was all 68k + lattice C if you were really looking to the future (with K&R syntax), BBSs accessed via 1200 baud modems, and music trackers.
- mnd999 4y agoI was mainly active towards the latter end but Matt Dillon (of DragonflyBSD fame)’s DICE C compiler was my tool of choice. I thought it was pretty nice.
- icedchai 4y agoYes! I taught myself C on Lattice C (later SAS/C) on an A500 with 3 megs of RAM and a 30 meg drive. That was a killer system back in 1990. I had a 2400 baud modem at the time, later upgraded to 9600 and felt like king of the nerds.
- EamonnMR 4y agoWhat bugged me most that season is the fact that they visibly equipped one of the heroes with an F91-W, a digital watch, then it's a plot beat later that his watch stopped, showing what time he jumped in the water. The script thought it was an analog watch, but clearly costume department didn't get the memo!
- causi 4y agoI need an ultra-nerd to drown ten F91-Ws and see if any fail in such a way as to lock the time on the display.
- squarefoot 4y agoIn theory, if water (especially salt water) reaches the xtal contacts, it could turn off the oscillation before its resistance messes with other parts of the watch turning it off completely, so there's a chance that it would stop, locking the time on the display before becoming unreadable.
- rasz 4y agono oscillation = no picture on the LCD, liquid crystal displays require AC signals, and those are derived from main clock
- varispeed 4y agoI spend two weeks swimming with F91-W in tropical waters a couple of years ago. Still works fine.
- bitwize 4y agoWhat got me -- and my jaw DROPPED when I saw this because it was just so obscure and specific -- was the fact that the point-of-sale computer prop in the video store was a Tandy 2000. The weird, but powerful in its day, PC-incompatible DOS computer that would pave the way for the Tandy 1000 and Radio Shack's whole PC line. 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 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.
- LeFantome 4y agoGood eye
- sandworm101 4y agoForgive the display. They very likely had framerate issues and went with whatever CRT screen didnt result in flickering on camera at thier chosen speed.
- bitwize 4y agoThey probably CG'd on the screen display in post. I think that's how most retro displays in films/TV are made now.
- timpark 4y agoI remember the show Halt and Catch Fire also had an Amiga 1000 in an episode, but they didn't bother to show anything resembling Workbench/AmigaOS. https://i.imgur.com/uaqzrEk.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/uaqzrEk.jpeg
- ido 4y agoI would guess some of these minor "goofs" while maintaining impressive accuracy elsewhere are intentional easter-eggs for people like us to discover and discuss! One example I liked from Halt and Catch Fire (a show with incredible accuracy of contemporary computer tech otherwise), when Donna uses a 286 PC in 1990 to run Windows 3.0 the boot sequence is showing 64mb RAM installed (the 80286 could only access maximum 16mb).
- JoachimS 4y agoIf you want that level of accuracy, the 80286 could actually handle 16 MByte, not 16 millibit.
- rep_lodsb 4y agoIn the very first episode they dump IBM's ROM chip - by wiring it to LEDs and then spending the entire night writing down bits on paper! Could have written a BASIC program on the machine itself to do it. 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.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoThis reminds me of a YouTube channel which was called "behind the screens" (IIRC). It's been active a few years ago and had short breakdowns of hacking/programming scenes from various movies. But I can't seem to find it again right now. Anyone know it and have a link?
- jgrahamc 4y agoHey. That was my channel. I moved it to a dedicated web site: https://behind-the-screens.tv/ https://behind-the-screens.tv/ The channel was a huge amount of work because I did original research for each video and that became incompatible with Cloudflare!
- iforgotpassword 4y agoAwesome, thanks! Bookmarked right away.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- achairapart 4y agoHollywood has always been very bad at depicting tech! Till late 90s and also in the early 00s every computer in every movie had no GUI, no mouse, green phosphor displays and obviously beeped at every keypress. 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!!". [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
- rasz 4y ago>Hollywood has always been very bad at depicting tech! Till late 90s and also in the early 00s every computer in every movie had no GUI, no mouse, green phosphor displays and obviously beeped at every keypress. dont forget the iconic ST-506 MFM hard disk seeking sound in the background
- diydsp 4y ago>Hollywood has always been very bad at depicting tech! 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.
- mhd 4y ago> The icon font is wrong, too: it's clearly IBM's VGA font, not Commodore's Topaz. A sloppy oversight, especially considering that versions of Topaz are readily available in TTF format. 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.
- Osborne 4y ago[dead]
- jgrahamc 4y agoHmm. Bunch of reference to "Weyland" and "Yutani" in there. So... Alien? 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://moviecode.tumblr.com/
- bee_rider 4y agoIt is kind of interesting, it looks like the Weyland timeline is kind of a mess. They apparently ignored the Alien vs Predator backstory when writing Prometheus. https://www.avpgalaxy.net/forum/index.php?topic=45645.0 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.
- varispeed 4y agoIt's tough. When you watch a TV show and you see they show computer stuff completely inaccurately, it makes you think what else is not accurate? 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.
- mattl 4y agoStranger Things also manages to get cereal incorrect. I think they’re trying to make a show set in era they lived in as kids but not one with any attention to detail.
- partomniscient 4y agoThe Duffer Brothers (writers) were born in 1984, so I don't think they'd remember much at all, they were alive but were a lot younger than the main kids in the show.
- ladyattis 4y agoGenerally, I can't watch most shows or films set in the 80s because they get so many things wrong or add in things from a later date. The things that almost every show or movie set in that time get wrong is how bad the economy was for anyone that wasn't in finance or adjacent industries. If you were a factory worker in Indiana in the 80s then you likely have been laid off half the time and worked odd jobs (Same with folks anywhere else in the midwest and great plains). Stranger Things implies this with Winona Ryder's character in parts of season 1 and 2 but mostly they seem to hide the grueling poverty of the 80s under the happy face side of things (I guess the mundane horrors of capitalism is too much for some writers).
- partomniscient 4y agoThere is actually orange on the workbench screen as well in an earlier scene. S4E6,37m40s. 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.
- greenbit 4y agoWell, what do we think they actually did, to generate those screens? 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.
- TillE 4y agoProbably just an emulator with a green theme, then Photoshop or whatever. Nobody wants to film an actual CRT.
- blincoln 4y agoFilming CRTs is a headache[1], but if it's simulated they did a pretty convincing job of matching the curve of the screen, reflections (especially in the first photo) and whatnot. 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.
- blincoln 4y agoMy guess would be that they customized something like https://taws.ch/WB.html https://taws.ch/WB.html 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.
- blincoln 4y agoAllegedly Netflix updated the episode to correct some of the details, like replacing the modern code with something less obvious: https://twitter.com/OzzyDweller/status/1562078723683356675 https://twitter.com/OzzyDweller/status/1562078723683356675
- mr_sturd 4y agoI wonder if they'll periodically swap the code depending on if they're recruiting...