Ted MacNEIL wrote: >In the late 1970's, the Computer 'Pit'. at the University of Waterloo, was >'borrowed' for a few scenes in a movie called Utilities starring Robert Hayes >(it came out in 1981). >The director complained that there weren't enough flashing lights (iirc, it >was a 158). >So, a bunch of us bread boarded a bunch of circuits, lights and switches >together for the lighting tech to use in the scenes. >The crew was happy and all the ops and comp-sc i guys thought it was >hilarious/ridiculous.
1982, not "late 1970s". The movie was released in 1983 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083266/combined). I worked there for the Department of Computing Services at the time. The 158 was long gone: we had four 4341s running VM/SP with Single System Image. The console was from the 360/75. It was wired to a Commodore SuperPet to drive the blinkenlights. The movie, alas, was terrible. Though it was of course fun to see the Pit! At one point someone walks out of the computer room and the camera angle changes to see him emerge...from what WE knew was one of the lecture halls upstairs, not any of the Red Room* doors. ...phsiii * The Pit was also called the Red Room, because it had these godawful red-shading-toward-pink tiles on the floor and walls. Allegedly (and I never got definitive confirmation of this) when the 360/75 was ordered, IBM was still offering custom colored panels, and the idea was to get panels to match the tiles. Depending on who you talked to, (a) IBM stopped offering custom colors ("anything you want as long as it's blue") and/or (b) one of the psych profs pointed out that putting operators in a red room with red panels around them doing a boring job was likely to result in psychosis, so the red panel order was cancelled. Of course, if you knew the UofW operations crew at the time, you knew that psychosis wasn't far away, which made this diagnosis more plausible...I remember working in one of the terminal rooms upstairs that overlooked the Pit, which was two stories high and surrounded by glass-walled rooms. You could make a tape mount request, see the operator look up and note it, and then go back to reading his book. Of course that didn't work that well for mounts from those of us who had keys to the room! Ah, the good (?) old days. The Pit is no more: a few years ago they covered over the second floor. I haven't been back to see, not sure I can stand it. But the 360/75 console is still there, I'm told. Last I'd seen, it was embedded in the wall of the Pit; not sure now... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
