And with stars and parentheses and names like TRAJ04, it looks a bit like early Fortran code (except that given the profusion of semicolons, it was more likely modeled on IBM’s PL/I language). It’s usually in a fairly modern-looking sans serif font (well, actually, a font called Manifold for IBM Selectric electric typewriters). But when 2001 was made, the idea of word processing, and of displaying text to read onscreen, was still several years in the future-probably not least because at the time people thought of computers as machines for calculation, and there didn’t seem to be anything calculational about text. Today, any such instructions (and they’d surely be much shorter, or at least broken up a lot, for today’s less patient readers) would be shown onscreen.
#DIGITAL COPY SPACE ODYSEY MOVIE#
So the computer displays in 2001 were, at least for me, something completely new.Īt the time it didn’t seem odd that in the movie there were lots of printed directions (how to use the "Picturephone," or the zero-gravity toilet, or the hibernation modules). There were oscilloscopes too, but they just had a single dot tracing out a line on the screen. But television wasn’t generating images it was just showing what a camera saw. Of course there was television (though color only arrived in the UK in 1968, and I’d only seen black and white). (Being something of a committed tool user, I myself was routinely using a typewriter even in 1968, though I didn’t know any other kids who were-and my hands at the time weren’t big or strong enough to do much other than type fast with one finger, a skill whose utility returned decades later with the advent of smartphones.) But in those days, very few people could type, and there probably didn’t seem to be any reason to think that would change. Of course, there were keyboards for computers back in the 1960s.
#DIGITAL COPY SPACE ODYSEY FULL#
There also aren’t any keyboards to be seen (and in the high-tech spacecraft full of computers going to Jupiter, the astronauts are writing with pens on clipboards presciently, no slide rules and no tape are shown-though there is one moment when a printout that looks awfully like a punched card is produced). (Both had actually been invented a few years before the movie was made, but neither was widely known.) And, yes, in the movie there weren’t any touchscreens-or mice.
To be fair, cockpits today still have plenty of buttons-but the centerpiece is now a display.
But otherwise, it’s lots and lots of mechanical buttons. But just when I was getting concerned, there was a bone thrown in the air that morphed into a spacecraft, and pretty soon there was a rousing waltz-and a big space station turning majestically on the screen.Īnother difference is in how the computers are controlled. I was confused, and frankly a little bored. But then what was going on? Those weren’t space scenes.
It started with an impressive extraterrestrial sunrise. And to this day, I remember sitting in a plush seat and eagerly waiting for the curtain to go up, and the movie to begin. I’d been dropped off for a matinee, and was pretty much the only person in the theater. So in the early summer of 1968 there I was, the first time I’d ever been in an actual cinema (yes, it was called that in the UK). Then on Ap(May 15 in the UK), the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was released-and I was keen to see it. And I was eagerly studying everything I could to do with space. For the first time, a space probe had recently landed on another planet (Venus).
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