In Give Me the Finger (Elementary S6:E6), vintage hardware gets a fair share of fame in the investigation. Jonny Lee Miller (Sherlock Holmes), Lucy Liu (Dr. Joan Watson) and Jon Michael Hill (Detective Marcus Bell) are investigating a murder linked to the upgrade of the US strategic defense obsolete computers with some modern garbage. The production team did a solid job here and must have cleaned-up eBay for our visual pleasure. We can see in this episode an impressive spread of RadioShack, IBM or DEC computers and mainframes. The cherry on the cake, an 8” floppy (so-called disk B) becomes the center of our attention while Sherlock lays down the why and how of the murder. Although the vintage hardware exhibition is impressive, there is room for improvement. Indeed, the software depiction is the weakest link. The few peeks we have on screens are unfortunately generated using modern computers. It would have been amazing to see instead a real dumb terminal in action. Nonetheless, thank you for this refreshing moment!
