Comment by bartread
11 hours ago
I love stuff like this.
Often films and TV shows have anachronisms in them (like the very first episode, IIRC, of Narcos with the clearly very modern touchscreen photocopier where the screen has been covered with a piece of paper, or the BMW that wasn't released until the mid/late 1990s), but every so often you'll see something that is instead a flash of the future.
Due to #reasons I watched the sentry gun scene in Aliens for the first time in decades the other day. This scene only appears in the director's cut of the film. Anyway, bearing in mind it was released in 1986, imagine my utter shock when Hicks busts out a couple of laptops to monitor and manage the guns. The machines in question are a pair of GRiD Compasses, originally released in, I think, 1984. Imagine that: a laptop computer from 1984. They're not even that big and cumbersome.
Of course, the specs are laughable by today's standards but actually pretty decent for the period, and especially for portables. In terms of memory and raw CPU power they'd certainly have wiped the floor with the average home computer of the day, although graphics capabilities might have been non-existent, and sound would have been PC speaker at best.
So, yeah, Nedry with a tablet? I can buy that. His whole den/lair is like a toy box of the coolest hardware and software from the early 1990s. But for all the times I've seen the film, I've never spotted this before.
GRiD Compass was the first portable computer in the now ubiquitous clamshell format, and it was launched in April 1982, several years before "Aliens". It was used in several high-profile applications, like in the NASA Space Shuttle and in some special operations of the US military. Therefore its use in the movie does not have any fantastic element in it.
They have patented the clamshell form, so all the early laptop manufacturers had to license their patent.
GRiD Compass was designed since the beginning with the main goal of being a computer that can be carried in a briefcase (at that time, engineers and programmers normally carried briefcases, not backpacks like today). This was somewhat similar with how the first "scientific" calculator had been designed by Hewlett-Packard, with the main goal of fitting inside a shirt pocket.
There have been a number of earlier portable computers, made by IBM, Xerox, Scrib, Sony, Epson, Osborne and a few others, but most of those were much more cumbersome and more difficult to carry (they were nicknamed "sewing machine" computers, for their size and weight), mainly because they had CRT displays, while GRiD Compass had a beautiful flat electroluminescent display.
Before GRiD Compass, there had also been a few Japanese portable computers with flat LCD screens, but in those the screen could not be folded, the body of the computer was in one piece, containing both the screen and the keyboard, like in an oversized calculator, so their screens were very small and they used very weak CPUs in comparison with GRiD Compass, which had an Intel 8086 (but it was not compatible with the IBM PC, as it was launched when the IBM PC was only 8 months old and not yet as important as it has become later).
> Therefore its use in the movie does not have any fantastic element in it.
That's very subjective.
I simply didn't know any of this before I saw that clip and was surprised to see a couple of recognisably modern form factor laptops. It sounds like there may have been several models of GRiD Compass but, as of a few days ago, I'd never heard of any of them.
The early to mid 80s was still very much also the era of the luggable, but in 1986 I'd never seen either a luggable or a laptop, and whilst 10 year old me probably wouldn't have been super-impressed with a heavy computer in a suitcase, I probably would have been agog at a laptop. I don't think I even knew what a laptop was until maybe the early 90s when they started to become a bit more commonplace.
When GRiD Compass was launched, I was in high school and I used to read regularly in a public library a magazine named "Electronics", which had been very important between 1930 and 1995 and where many significant news in the electronics and computing industries were announced first.
The launch of GRiD Compass started with a campaign of advertising in that magazine, which had very spectacular photos of the computer demonstrating various applications, especially due to its unusual flat electroluminescent display with a nice bright orange color.
Even if I usually am immune to advertising, I was very impressed by the GRiD Compass advertisements, so I have been remembering them until today, despite never seeing one in real life.
While GRiD Compass made me aware since the beginning of the existence of the laptop format (the word "laptop" has been coined one year after the launch of GRiD Compass by another company, Gavilan, which has introduced a computer copying the clamshell form, but made at a lower price, with a proportionally lower quality), I also had the opportunity of using laptops only many years later, starting in the year 2000.