Kirk's 20th cen. computer in TWoK

[Crewman47]

Just watching this just now and something I've never noticed before but the old antique computer that Kirk has in his aprtment that we can see when McCoy visits him to give him his birthday is on and in working mode as you can briefly see a command prompt blinking. Do you think that Kirk knows how to operate it and actually knows command code and may have been doing some his own programs?

Any thoughts?

 

[Peach Wookiee]

That'd be interesting... Would've been a very old PC...

 

[Maurice]

It appears to be some kind of Commodore PET , probably an 2001 series, with the keyboard partion painted black.

Any coincidence that Shatner used to be the mouthpiece for these?

 

[Peach Wookiee]

How much memory was on that antique?

 

[Jon1701]

Basic model had 4kb.

 

[Kryton]

That's not a lot. But who would EVER need more than 64kb of memory anyway?

 

[Crewman47]

DS9Sega said:
It appears to be some kind of Commodore PET , probably an 2001 series, with the keyboard partion painted black.

Any coincidence that Shatner used to be the mouthpiece for these?

I take it then that this type of computer was at the time the movie was released being used as product placement becuase of Shatner being both a spokesman for the product and his popularity as a Trek actor? Never knew you could manage to get product placement in a show set in the future.

 

[Ronald Held]

I remember reading that 640Kb of RAM was all anyone would every need.

 

[Unicron]

Lol. I remember in one of the older Transformers eps, Megatron reprogrammed an "advanced" computer to do his bidding. It would have been advanced then, since it's described as having a whopping 10 megs!

 

[arch101]

^^^Was Bill Gates responsible for the 640KB quote, or is that an urban myth?

 

[SonicRanger]

arch101 said:
^^^Was Bill Gates responsible for the 640KB quote, or is that an urban myth?

Gates denies it...

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/gatesivu.htm

But, of course, he could be lying, could have forgotten, could have been misquoted, etc.

 

[Sir Rhosis]

Can't remember what they said it was, but I'm pretty sure the Okuda text commentary on the film identifies the exact make and model of the computer (not saying the above is wrong; I wouldn't know--my first computer was an Atari 800XL!).

Sir Rhosis

 

[David cgc]

Unicron said:
Lol. I remember in one of the older Transformers eps, Megatron reprogrammed an "advanced" computer to do his bidding. It would have been advanced then, since it's described as having a whopping 10 megs!

The TWOK novelization describes the Genesis scientists, in their off time, designing a massive computer game in the Regula One mainframe. When Carol Marcus found out about it, and that it took up a whole 50 megabytes of disk space, she exclaimed that it was "the game that swallowed Saturn!"

I have to say, inventing fictitious units of measurement was one of the smartest things modern Trek did. How much is an "isoton" or a "gigaquad"? I don't know, and as long as it avoids stuff like that, I don't care.

 

[Kirby]

Crewman47 said:

Oh man, I just got nostalgic for my old VIC 20. I was so jealous of my friend Jim because he had the Commodore 64, with it's huge 64k of memory.

 

[Michael]

Never knew you could manage to get product placement in a show set in the future.

You don't remember the Pepsi, Jaws, etc. references in "Back To The Future Part II"?

 

[SonicRanger]

^^^

Ever see the "Zima" sign in the bar on B5?

 

[David cgc]

Well, that was only added because Zima advertised so heavily during the show's timeslot, they may as well have been slipping ads into the show. It was a joke, not an actual paid advertisement.

 

[NathanielM]

OMFG!!!!!! That is SCARY!!!!!

AND quite disturbing....

Hey where's his fliver and his tommy gun... (Nayahhh see Nayahhh nayahhh, gonna put da bag on Nimoy see...)




Nathaniel

 

[Peach Wookiee]

Good grief... my new USB drive has 4 gigs of memory...

 

[Manticore]

My old USB drive has 128 MB of memory.