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golden-gun
The Man With The Golden Gun is the James Bond movie where Roger Moore flies to the tip of the Malay Peninsula so he can do battle with the little dude from Fantasy Island and a cold-blooded contract killer who has three nipples and a serious solar energy fetish.
When Moore arrives, his three-nippled nemesis takes him on a tour of a massive underground lair where vats of liquid helium convert raw sunlight into a death ray capable of squeezing money from the largest countries on Earth. But the most amazing part of this solar extravaganza is that it's all run by an ICT 1301.
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The Most Wonderfully Ridiculous Movie Computers of All TimeICT -- short for International Computers and Tabulators -- was Britain's answer to IBM. The 1301 was a business machine built in the early 1960s, when punch cards and drum storage were state of the art. In other words, it wasn't built for use with vats of liquid helium. "It was built to do pounds, shillings, and pence arithmetic in hardware," says Roger Holmes, part of a team in Britain working to restore an old ICT 1301 to working order. "It was also a decimal machine, but strictly speaking, it couldn't do binary calculations."
Some love The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) for that stunt where the red AMC hatchback jumps over a river and corkscrews to the other side. Others love it for Roger Moore's hideous mid-'70s wardrobe. But here at Wired, we love it for the ICT 1301.
Last month, we profiled The Most Wonderfully Ridiculous Movie Computers of All Time, hailing the beautifully nonsensical machines that turn up in everything from The Towering Inferno to War Games, and naturally, you told us our list was far from complete. So, with this, The Return of the World's Most Wonderfully Ridiculous Movie Computers, we make amends -- at least until you tell us we left out something else.
Yes, The Man With the Golden Gun deserves a spot on the list. It's one of those classic Hollywood productions that took a very real and very outdated computer and applied to a task that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. It ranks up there with Sleeper and The Billion Dollar Brain.
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<script type="text/javascript">brightcove.createExperiences();</script> Compared to modern machines -- including the laptop on your coffee table -- early computers like the ICT 1301 were extremely limited devices, but some were rather photogenic, and as they were scrapped in the mid to late 1960s, they wound up in the hands of Hollywood production designers looking for some eye candy they could slot into a Bond villan's underground lair or a spacecraft traveling to Alpha Centauri in a year somewhere in distant future -- like 1997. The best example is the IBM AN/FSQ-7, a machine designed in the late-'50s for a radar defense system operated by the U.S. Air Force. It was originally built with vacuum tubes, but after Hollywood got hold of the thing, it was running everything from robot repair shops to half-baked time machines. But the ICT 1301 isn't far behind. In The Pink Panther Strikes Again, it helps Dreyfus vaporize the United Nations. It turns up in British TV staples like Doctor Who and Blake 7. And it takes a bow in not one but two Bond films. The other is For Your Eyes Only (1981). Roger Holmes confirms that the 1301's star turn in The Man With The Golden Gun doesn't exactly stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, it's not exactly a 1301. It's just a pair of 1301 control panels, each of which measures about 4 feet by 3 feet. The rest of the machine -- which would cover about 700 square feet of floor space -- is nowhere to be found. You can see the two control panels above, just behind Roger Moore (007) and Christopher Lee (the man with the golden gun -- and the three nipples). Moore eventually slays his three-nippled nemesis, but then a bikini-class Britt Ekland hits a henchman over the head with a wrench and he tumbles into a vat of liquid helium. Naturally, this means that the underground lair blows sky high -- once Britt and Roger have time to escape. And that was the end of those ICT control panels. Or perhaps not. When the lair blows up, it's not really the lair. It's just a miniature. In the movies, things aren't always what they seem. And that's why we love them. To see the rest of the list, click on the images above. Like The Man With the Golden Gun, some of these films show real machines doing unreal things. But others opt for 100 percent unreality. Think Superman III. Or Hackers. Or the classic you nominated more than any other: Colossus: The Forbin Project You were right. Colossus can't be beat. At least, we don't think so. If you still have other suggestions, please e-mail us at: cade_metz@wired.com.
The Most Wonderfully Ridiculous Movie Computers of All TimeICT -- short for International Computers and Tabulators -- was Britain's answer to IBM. The 1301 was a business machine built in the early 1960s, when punch cards and drum storage were state of the art. In other words, it wasn't built for use with vats of liquid helium. "It was built to do pounds, shillings, and pence arithmetic in hardware," says Roger Holmes, part of a team in Britain working to restore an old ICT 1301 to working order. "It was also a decimal machine, but strictly speaking, it couldn't do binary calculations."
Some love The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) for that stunt where the red AMC hatchback jumps over a river and corkscrews to the other side. Others love it for Roger Moore's hideous mid-'70s wardrobe. But here at Wired, we love it for the ICT 1301.
Last month, we profiled The Most Wonderfully Ridiculous Movie Computers of All Time, hailing the beautifully nonsensical machines that turn up in everything from The Towering Inferno to War Games, and naturally, you told us our list was far from complete. So, with this, The Return of the World's Most Wonderfully Ridiculous Movie Computers, we make amends -- at least until you tell us we left out something else.
Yes, The Man With the Golden Gun deserves a spot on the list. It's one of those classic Hollywood productions that took a very real and very outdated computer and applied to a task that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. It ranks up there with Sleeper and The Billion Dollar Brain.
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://admin.brightcove.com/js/BrightcoveExperiences.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<object class="BrightcoveExperience" id="myExperience1942606093001"><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"></param><param name="width" value="660"></param><param name="height" value="380"></param><param name="playerID" value="1577029897001"></param><param name="playerKey" value="AQ~~,AAAAAF1BIQQ~,g5cZB_aGkYZC26fBYKv5Nsnal0IamyGL"></param><param name="isVid" value="true"></param><param name="isUI" value="true"></param><param name="dynamicStreaming" value="true"></param><param name="@videoPlayer" value="1942606093001"></param></object><script type="text/javascript">brightcove.createExperiences();</script> Compared to modern machines -- including the laptop on your coffee table -- early computers like the ICT 1301 were extremely limited devices, but some were rather photogenic, and as they were scrapped in the mid to late 1960s, they wound up in the hands of Hollywood production designers looking for some eye candy they could slot into a Bond villan's underground lair or a spacecraft traveling to Alpha Centauri in a year somewhere in distant future -- like 1997. The best example is the IBM AN/FSQ-7, a machine designed in the late-'50s for a radar defense system operated by the U.S. Air Force. It was originally built with vacuum tubes, but after Hollywood got hold of the thing, it was running everything from robot repair shops to half-baked time machines. But the ICT 1301 isn't far behind. In The Pink Panther Strikes Again, it helps Dreyfus vaporize the United Nations. It turns up in British TV staples like Doctor Who and Blake 7. And it takes a bow in not one but two Bond films. The other is For Your Eyes Only (1981). Roger Holmes confirms that the 1301's star turn in The Man With The Golden Gun doesn't exactly stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, it's not exactly a 1301. It's just a pair of 1301 control panels, each of which measures about 4 feet by 3 feet. The rest of the machine -- which would cover about 700 square feet of floor space -- is nowhere to be found. You can see the two control panels above, just behind Roger Moore (007) and Christopher Lee (the man with the golden gun -- and the three nipples). Moore eventually slays his three-nippled nemesis, but then a bikini-class Britt Ekland hits a henchman over the head with a wrench and he tumbles into a vat of liquid helium. Naturally, this means that the underground lair blows sky high -- once Britt and Roger have time to escape. And that was the end of those ICT control panels. Or perhaps not. When the lair blows up, it's not really the lair. It's just a miniature. In the movies, things aren't always what they seem. And that's why we love them. To see the rest of the list, click on the images above. Like The Man With the Golden Gun, some of these films show real machines doing unreal things. But others opt for 100 percent unreality. Think Superman III. Or Hackers. Or the classic you nominated more than any other: Colossus: The Forbin Project You were right. Colossus can't be beat. At least, we don't think so. If you still have other suggestions, please e-mail us at: cade_metz@wired.com.
