PDP-8 spotted in movie...
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Ken Hansen
Jan 12, 2026, 12:37:26 AM (10 days ago) Jan 12
to PiDP-8
Hello all,
I was watching an old Robert Redford movie, "Three Days of the Condor," and without ruining the story in case you haven't seen it, part of the background story is that Robert Redford and works for the CIA, reading books, summarizing their plot elements, and "loading them into the computer". They have what appears to be a machine that flips pages in a book while the computer "scans" the text and stores them in the computer. (I'm not spoiling anything, they explain all this in the first 5 min of the movie.)
Of course, the computer is a PDP-8, in a tall rackmount case maybe 4' tall, with another 4' case next to it holding the tape drive (the cases were that tall to put the computers in-frame I suspect). What's funny watching this 50 year-old movie is how the actors were apparently instructed to 'fiddle with the switches' while standing near it, the switches they play with are random address and data switches, just flipping them on and off...
I thought it was something others here might find interesting.
Ken
I was watching an old Robert Redford movie, "Three Days of the Condor," and without ruining the story in case you haven't seen it, part of the background story is that Robert Redford and works for the CIA, reading books, summarizing their plot elements, and "loading them into the computer". They have what appears to be a machine that flips pages in a book while the computer "scans" the text and stores them in the computer. (I'm not spoiling anything, they explain all this in the first 5 min of the movie.)
Of course, the computer is a PDP-8, in a tall rackmount case maybe 4' tall, with another 4' case next to it holding the tape drive (the cases were that tall to put the computers in-frame I suspect). What's funny watching this 50 year-old movie is how the actors were apparently instructed to 'fiddle with the switches' while standing near it, the switches they play with are random address and data switches, just flipping them on and off...
I thought it was something others here might find interesting.
Ken
Jeff Jetton
Jan 12, 2026, 8:00:21 AM (10 days ago) Jan 12
to Ken Hansen, PiDP-8
Neat! Here's the entry for it on the wonderful website "Starring the Computer", although one of the included photos is somewhat of a SPOILER: https://www.starringthecomputer.com/feature.html?f=12
They list several other movie/TV appearances of various PDPs, going all the way back to a (brand-new at the time) PDP-8/F in a 1972 British TV movie called "The Stone Tape": https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computers.html#DAP%20
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Steve Tockey
Jan 12, 2026, 7:25:52 PM (9 days ago) Jan 12
to Jeff Jetton, Ken Hansen, PiDP-8
The original "Classic 8" (sometimes called the "Straight 8") appears in an episode of James Burke's series "Connections". The Classic 8 predates the PDP-8/i by a couple of years, the major difference between them being only that the Classic 8 was all discrete transistor-capacitor-resistor components while the PDP-8/i used Integrated Circuits (ICs).
An overview of the episode of Connections is here:
Cheers,
-- steve
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