Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

bluescreen — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:11:24 GMT

Anyone happen to catch last week's episode of The Walking Dead? Spotted a Hackaday sticker in one of the scenes.

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RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

jw0752 — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 17:35:55 GMT

There is a new program on US TV now called Cyber CSI. Last night they had a bad guy using micro computer boards to hack roller coasters and subway trains. Of course the boards all had the prerequisite bright LED. Amazingly the LED stays lit even when the board is unplugged. The spy bugs, and other questionable electronics devices in movies and TV shows always have a large red flashing LED attached. I have given up with expecting to see any honesty in the technology portrayed in TV shows and Movies.

John

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

clem57 — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 14:57:01 GMT

I just saw an old movie with Gene Hackman in The Conversation using electronics to eavesdrop and then having the tables turned:

Or how about a more recent one called "21" which shows an Arduino in one scene having a "plugged in the chip" with wrong number of bits![View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-31e581b5-0baa-40ae-bf67-97e1c0bd7530/contentimage_5F00_938.png:16:16]

You pick which one you like(d).

Clem

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

clem57 — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 02:12:28 GMT

OMG! lest we forget the one and only Mr Spock.

May he RIP!

Clem

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

D_Hersey — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 00:03:24 GMT

"Frankenstein" would have to be mentioned.

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

D_Hersey — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 20:30:19 GMT

The guy who could translate the Chicagoan's voice to text was probably Royko:

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I want to see a film about the relationship between Buckminster Fuller, MC Escher and Don Coxeter.

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

D_Hersey — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 18:17:33 GMT

Then there came to be 'BBC English.' When radio came to the USA the Midwestern accent was preferred for national broadcast. I had a hard time believing that 'We have an accent, too!' which is what my parents told me when I was a kid. They were right.

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

bluescreen — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 16:30:41 GMT

The radio idea sounds really cool. I didn't know that was how BBC was born.

Have any of you seen the new film about Alan Turing? I haven't seen it, but someone recently told me the filmmakers took quite a few creative liberties-- more than he felt were warranted.

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RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

D_Hersey — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 16:29:41 GMT

Electronics and the enabling of the surveillance state

starting with Hollerith

ending with Whitfield Diffie.

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

D_Hersey — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 16:14:24 GMT

There aren't enough films about this exciting field. There are a few good biographies of Michael Faraday out there. Michael Faraday was a bon homme, a helper at a bookstore. Oliver Heaviside is equally appealing in that regard.

Ben Franklin had a road-show about electricity.

The documentary I would like to produce, get your wallets out, this will have to be a group thing, is about the introduction of radio to Britain. Birth of the BBC.

Radio started with spark-gaps. Bandwidth-narrowing was first attempted by tuning antennas. The immediate consumer of this technology was ships at sea. By the time of the documentary, this had been going on for thirty years.

Guys in the English government got the idea for terrestrial broadcasting. But they were faced with a recursion issue: Who would buy a receiver when there were no broadcasters? Who would establish a transmitter when there were no receivers? By now top valves had come along.

The government decided to build a radio and give it away to every mailing address!

This is probably the first expansion of government services beyond the traditional ones. This was also the first time women were employed, en-masse, outside the home. Because this was a new job for society, it was decided to use people who weren't already working formally. Up until 1980 electronic line assembly was the leading employer of women in the USA. Two million of them were dumped on the street without warning when surface-mount came in.

They made everything from scratch to save costs.

Travellers to the Isles returned to their home countries and demanded wireless service.

==========

EH Armstrong deserves a bio that has some dramatic rendering to it rather than just a litany of occurrences. Some narrative arc.

The Op-Amp story. Started out as a contract with Fairchild to develop automatic exposure for 35mm film cameras. Still (arguably) the best soln for IRL challenges.

The PLL/FFL story. I know why we were in better shape back then! We had to de-couch in order to trim the roll out of our tubes as they warmed up.

The feedback story. Drama as Dr. Harold Black gets stiffed at the patent office.

Masers and Lasers. Also cosmic masers and gravitational lensing.

Magnetic cores. Start with the universal phenomenon of reactance. Spin pairing, intermediate (4) valence stability, Curie point. Antecedence.

Meaning of complex terms describing magnetic materials. B-H. What the quantitative differences in hysteresis curve imply for core application. Global issues with rare-earth minerals, mining and smelting. This may sound dry, but the kids are real hot on magnetics nowadays.

Beyond and before the transistor. SCRs, thermionics, spark-gaps, cryotrons. Saturable reactor amps. PIN diodes.

Thoradson Transformer, first commercially viable electronics part fab.

Development of TV from an international perspective. Ends with cold war race for the Jumbotron.

Soviet electronics, then and now.

Electronics in WWII. Cascode loads, tetrodes and pentodes. Radar. Sonar. Remote control. Computing. Developments in quartz oscillators and solid-state theory. Air war over London, robot guns. Statistical process control. Sniffing, jamming, spoofing. FM. Spread-spectrum.

Transformers and T-lines. Waveguides

Antennas

History of modulation schemes and the possibilities created by them. Detection schemes.

Monsters of linear

Digital filtration

Analog filtration

superconductivity T&A

information theory -- philosophy meets e- to their mutual benefit

computing fabrics versus VonN processors. Tips in architectural choices.

optical and quantum computing

A. Volta. I, for one, am glad that we have dispensed with the frog-leg detector!

Monsters of rock, signal processing in popular music. the dream teams behind the Beatles and Jimi.

Superhet and alternatives

history of memory. who can resist talking about SIU's Hg column!

The diode, then and now.

Intel 8008 to Zilog Z-80

Anyway, if you ask me, the field is replete with barely-explored cinematic topics.

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

D_Hersey — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 04:29:58 GMT

From Urbana Illinois. . .

HAL 9000 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

johnbeetem — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 21:21:40 GMT

Westworld (1973) has awesome electronic and computer technology. I like the underground workshop where they fix the robots that got shot up the night before. Great image of Yul Brynner's face being removed to do an ill-advised upgrade.

I like the computer room scenes. I think one of the monitors is showing PDP-8 assembly language [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-31e581b5-0baa-40ae-bf67-97e1c0bd7530/0412.contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]

I really got interested in robotics from seeing Westworld, but the interest waned when I saw how primitive real technology was circa 1973.

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

DAB — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 20:49:01 GMT

I go into Engineering by watching the original Mission Impossible TV show.

I watched Garret Morris come up with new solutions to set up an electronics solution for the mission each week.

The show left me wanting to do stuff like that.

Luckily, in my career, I got to do even neater stuff.

DAB

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

johnbeetem — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 19:38:01 GMT

Sneakers (1992) should definitely be on the list. Quite a bit of electronic wizardry, but human talents are more important especially David Strathairn as "Whistler", a blind genius who can figure out what electrical lines are up to by listening to them.

Robert Redford has the best line: "You know, I could have been in the NSA, but they found out my parents were married."

RE: Best references to electronic engineering in film or TV?

michaelwylie — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 19:08:42 GMT

I'm not sure about the best, but in the Transformers movie (first one) when the girl says Fourier Transfer I groaned out loud.