I have two spottings to share with you this week. First one is in All the Money in the World (2017, Ridley Scott). The storyline retraces the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III. The movie is well served by Michelle Williams (Gail Harris), Christopher Plummer (J. Paul Getty), Mark Wahlberg (Fletcher Chace), Romain Duris (Cinquanta) and of course Charlie Plummer (John Paul Getty III). We can spot two vintage computers in the movie. The first one is a venerable Apple ][ computer. The system is powered-up, but the display seems awfully empty, and the contrast/light pushed to the max. So, it is unclear if the prop is functional. The second vintage equipment is a Ferranti Data Dynamics 390 Teletype. We can see Paul Getty all along with the movie checking – oil – stock prices. The funny thing here is that the output of the teletype tape puncher is not a stock ticker tape you can read – except if you are good at binary decoding, or the stock info is literally printed in 8-hole high. Possible, but that would be a very inefficient output format. And Getty would not have agreed to it …
The second spotting is in The Girl in the Spider’s Web (2019, Fede Alvarez). Claire Foy (Lisbeth Salander) plays a computer hacker fighting against a complot involving spies from several countries alongside several characters from the Millenium series. The hardware spotting is a Commodore CBM Model 4032. We can see it in Cameron Britton’s (Plague) lair. Although the unit is powered and seems to work (though, they didn’t go further starting it up), I do not see what it can be useful for …
On the software side, drum roll please, we can see our old friend from the Linux kernel: groups.c. Specifically, it is again groups_allocate(). Spotting the same function once, fine. Twice, hard to believe that it is a coincidence. But three times, no way, it is a complot! 😉
