Library computer scene in 1986 movie (modem, monitor, screen, flash)
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The movie Pretty In Pink from 1986 has a scene where a boy sends a message to a girl's mainframe computer in the high school library. Then he sends a picture of her on the screen with fancy graphics.
Was this type of technology even possible back then? I can remember in the early 1990's pictures on the computer were very rare and seemed primitive in comparison. So this movie was almost a decade earlier than that.
You could send files that then had to opened up with different software. I bought a modem with my first computer, an Apple II Plus in December 1979. The modem was painfully slow (300 baud), and I had to pay long-distance phone fees to use it, so it didn't get used much. I didn't have a need for it, thankfully; it was just another toy that didn't get much use.
I didn't get another one until 1991, iirc. It wasn't fast either. In fact, it was so slow that I only used it once for its intended purpose (to send Pagemaker and Photoshop files to a printer for a small magazine). After that debacle I found a local printer! But I did use it for my first foray into social media where I met a lovely woman in New Jersey who later became my wife.
Unlikely, the image quality was too good. Even if an image format capable of detail like that was available the displayed pixel density capabilities of the computer would not. Plus you're going to have issues with file sizes because of lack of compression etc... even with compression the file size would most likely be an issue.
Just to add on the plus side the images are monochromatic which would be ideal for early formats like .GIF that reduced the colors to 256. A .GIF using different shades of the same color can be very detailed if you have the right image editor.
I don't question the image quality, per se (though only a top of the line monitor would have had the resolution to display that image at that level of detail) but the speed at which it appeared on screen was definitely science fiction at the time :-) In real life, it would have taken minutes to render, line by line.
Another good 'fake' computer scene from the 80s is from Revenge of the Nerds where the nerd, Gilbert, through simple keystrokes hacked a girl's computer, then drew and animated a recognizable caricature of himself dancing with the girl whose computer he hacked, all in seconds.
The movie Pretty In Pink from 1986 has a scene where a boy sends a message to a girl's mainframe computer in the high school library. Then he sends a picture of her on the screen with fancy graphics.
Was this type of technology even possible back then? I can remember in the early 1990's pictures on the computer were very rare and seemed primitive in comparison. So this movie was almost a decade earlier than that.
I know exactly what scene you're talking about.
Is it technically possible? Yeah, probably. Is it possible in a practical reality kind of way? No way. School computers weren't networked back then (almost nothing outside the enterprise was networked at that point), so there would have been no way to communicate between systems.
I laugh at that scene when I see that film. It's comically unrealistic.
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