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Star Wars Buttons And Lights You May Have Missed (vice.com)
tedlistens writes: At Motherboard, Alex Pasternack writes: "Star Wars is set in a world of wildly advanced technology. But take a good look at the machinery of Star Wars, and you may be surprised to see how wonderfully analog it all is -- buttons! levers! vector graphics! Yes, there are hyperdrives and lightsabers and hologram Princess Leias and droids that know six million languages (including the language of moisture vaporators, along with various etiquette and diplomatic protocols useful across the galaxy). But it's also a world where sometimes you have to hit a robot to get it to work, like an old dashboard radio, a place where the supercomputers are operated manually and where buttons and control panels and screens seem far removed from our own galaxy: tactile, lo-fi, and elegantly simple." May the 4th be with you.
Another fine submission. I will definitely take time out of my day to read and think about and discuss the blinking lights and levers on Star Wars sets.
Dune: kid who develops super-powers turns out to be the grandson of the bad guy.
Star Wars: kid who develops super-powers turns out to be the son of the bad guy.
Anyway, Star Wars was made in 1977. That's why there are buttons all over the place. Even the glossy, utopian, everything's-perfect sci-fi of the 70s had buttons.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Designers of 1970s movies used examples from 1970s.
How is this news? Take a look at the Deathstar's control panel. It is right from a 1970s era power station control room, a cutting edge one at that.
Aliens has everything from green-phosphor, text-only teletype-speed consoles to yellow-screen laptops, to low-res monochrome blocky graphics, to huge "TVs" full of monochrome photographs and green text. .
Even for the sentry guns, the remote piloting via a huge satellite uplink, the Earth-based personnel records, the hypersleep computers, the blueprint machines, the health read-outs, the motion sensors, etc. etc. etc.
In a movie, the tech shown is what feels / looks good, not what would actually be used (e.g. nmap in The Matrix Reloaded), and even back in the day teletype terminals were long dead, but the ddddrrrtttttt of text appearing one letter at a time is much more cinematic:
File Closed.
At first glance, when I thought about the analog computer interface you see R2D2 using all the time, I thought "how stupid - a mechanical interface between computers". But then, the more I thought about it, it actually made sense. It's clear it is a rotational interface, like turning a dial. Well, what precision can an object be rotated to? How man "positions" can it be in? It's infinite. Pi never ends or repeats, so you can go into infinite precision as to the rotational position of a knob. They are only limited by their technological ability to detect rotational position (which could be done through an electromagnetic field). So it is conceivable they have the ability to detect the rotational position with some incredible precision, thus a single rotation of the knob, by stopping at some specific position, could transfer a vast amount of information. The interface can of course be 2-way. Sometimes R2 is rotating the interface, and sometimes the host machine is rotating. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.
Better known as 318230.