Moreover, I went on one, in August 2001. (It was part of a weeklong program on using remote sensing in the high school curriculum.) Needless to say, a month or so later, they stopped them again.
Wasn't the AI called WOPR, not Joshua. It seemed to me that Joshua was more a nickname, not the actual name.
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Joshua was Falken's name for the AI; as one of the drivers was him teaching Noughts and Crosses to his 5-year-old son when he was doing the R&D into AI. It was also his backdoor account (JOSHUA 5 in the novelisation). Confirmed - nickname.
486-powered rotating frosted cherry Pop-Tart
Since there's no Trivia Wiki entry for this yet, I'm just gonna leave this here. The graphics on the Big Board were rendered on an early HP graphics workstation, and shown using film projectors. The terminals inside NORAD are TeleVideo 925s (the screen font is the giveaway). I used an old 950 to read Usenet back when I was at Virginia Tech in 1995-1996, so that's how I know about them.
online since 1993 | huge retrocomputing and TV nerd | lee4hmz.info (under construction) | heapershangout.com Hide / Show Replies
Also you see one in longshot when David is in Mc Kittrick's office. I used them as well - for coursework on an old Alpha Micro A400 while doing my BTEC National Diploma in 1987-1989.
State of Mind
Leaving this here since I can't tell is this is an actual trope or not.
- Mc Laren Special: Opaquely named trope for a World War Three blind dry run. The opening scene in the missile silo where the order comes through to launch and the launcher officers are not told it is a drill.
- The book "Men Who Play God" by Norman Moss contains a great deal on the makeup of these silos and the routines the men follow. There is IIRC a live trigger (red) and a practice trigger (black). There is no "turn the key and pray to all the gods you know that NORAD has selected 'drill'" scenario. This is simply the plot device that justifies WOPR's existence, but to the uninitiated it's a good one.
- Password Slot Machine: Invented it. It took him a full six days to figure it out though.
Six days? Wrong password; this trope is about the ten-digit launch code. ("It's got the _th digit!") I'll change this.
And in response to Camacan's objection in the archived discussion, Peace Through Superior Firepower is a trope about depiction of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, not about having the bigger stick — that would be Might Makes Right. Re-adding it.
Cheyenne Mountain *never* had tours? I've found articles indicating they did exist in the past, such as one in the Baltimore Sun around 1/3/1999
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