Why Can't Hollywood Get Computers Right? | Netflix's FUBAR Debunked 

Goofs: 1) Sorry about the background music. Don't know why but every now and again the mostly hushed background music suddenly pops out after YT processing. Was a bit too eager to get this video out and didn't really notice how strong it was. 2) Oops! I typoed/messed up on True Lies' date! As others have pointed out.. it's 1994, not 1992. 3) I forgot with DOS, etc, the RTC only is consulted at startup - after that time is governed by other circuitry. Speed of clock can be influenced, but only with specific mods and definitely not just 'MOAR POWER'. 4) Did I mention my math sucks? I calculated going from 12mhz to 40mhz was a 330% increase. Actually it's 233%.

Guess what, you're not actually spoiling the show. You're saving us from putting ourselves through another terrible offering. Thankyou.

This kind of thing always drives me crazy. And the sad part is, most of the time I see this sort of thing, it could have been easily fixed had they bothered to ask somebody that knows something about computers (or physics, chemistry, history, or whatever is being misrepresented) and with minor script changes, still keep the plot they were working with.

I'm always fascinated how computer "stuff" are handled the same way as magic "stuff". It's all "Magic with Monitors"

I always love 80’s and 90’s sitcoms that required the actors playing a console game, no matter what it was, the sound affects were clearly Atari PacMan.

Not really a tech person myself, but something that always drove me nuts was that every movie and tv show where a 'hidden bug' had been placed they all have a flashing LED attached. Or that every bomb has a large visible countdown display attached and a definitive color scheme for its wiring.

If you do a war movie, you get a military adviser, if you do a medieval movie you get an historian (hopefully), hospital movie - a doctor, but if you do some tech or scifi movie just slam random parts together, forget the cables and tell nonsense all the way.

There seem to be opposite design strategies among Hollywood movieworld door manufacturers: Doors that are meant to be freely opened (corridors, escape routes, public areas) can be closed and securely locked by destroying the electronic lock next to it (given it separates the hero from their persuers at any given moment), while prison doors, treasure vaults, security stations etc. can easily be unlocked and opened by the same procedure.

My brain started bleeding when she talked about speeding up the cycles

In reality, the Soviet Era bunker would have been controlled by a relay panel, not a stupid DOS computer.

TV shows with "tech" plots like this are a big reason why I start and then quit watching then. For example I tried watching the CBS show Scorpion almost a decade ago. There was so much tech related stuff that was ridiculously wrong I couldn't get through more than a handful of episodes before I gave up. I realize for the average person they don't know or don't care, but for someone who's been in the IT world for decades it's almost insulting at times.

As someone with a solid background in history, I feel the same way about historical dramas. I can hardy watch them as I just cannot overlook the mistakes and errors.

Knowing what PSU that is will really help them identify the CPU I'm sure.

Every safe room or vault I know of has a manual internal mechanism to release or activate the door. They also have the ability to vent outside air by default. Futher, if we're talking a soviet-era "computer" it's far more likely to be an Apple II, Sinclair or MSX clone. p.s. don't grill me on the 80's era hardware :P There are a plethora of options that would have been more visually interesting and probably cheaper.

They also said that the Aluminum in the can is a good conductor, when that style of pull top can is made out of steel.. They even messed up the cans!!!

I know some of the people who do this kind of work for a living. Trust me, they are just as frustrated as you are. The problem is usually the client, they have some idea in their head what they feel it should look like and even though none of it makes any sense, the vfx artist are forced to do it that way anyway. A lot of what you see is often added in post production. Furthermore, those props which might not make sense are just grabbed from a prop warehouse where the options are limited. If you have ever been in one, it looks like a giant thrift store. Attentive viewers might spot the same props in multiple shows and movies. The set designers are usually dumb as rocks too, they just place things around till the client is happy.

A plausible plot could have been that the computer works fine, displays a menu that can open the door but has no keyboard. That would justify browsing through the old computer junk. They would use the junk pieces to interface the PS2 port to their mobile phone. Some team members could argue about the serial protocol (speed, parity bits, ...) and what values must be sent to navigate in the menus.

I mean they could have examined the door panel, found that the micro controller is fried, then find the old Russian PC clone. It has a parallel port. Some smart guy then could have had the idea to use the parallel port to override the pins of the fried micro controller in the door panel to find out the super secret bit combination that opens the door. But that probably would have made the plot too short.

Of all things, the fan *wires* were overheating? I guess they just thought of the can lid solution and worked their way backwards. A fan with dried up bearings that was stuttering or had seized up would be more accurate. But there was a relatively huge fan in the ducting on the wall behind the computer, could've just ripped that off and pointed it at the exposed side.

Great Breakdown. But, the single most glaring issue with this "1989 PC" that i noticed was the USB ports on the I/O panel. 😂

The thing that stood out to me immediately (besides the obvious plot devices) was the time incongruity of having a system from "1989," but a case that looks like it's from the late 90s. Then they get to the insides and you can tell it's a PCI motherboard, which ALSO came out much later than 1989. Surprised you didn't mention either.

To be fair, back in the pre-2010s, I did indeed have *several* tote boxes of replacement PC parts laying around... for _decades_ I lugged this crap around, even long after even the bus design of whichever component had changed (although most PCs still retained legacy slots). Of course, the simplest solution for their date quandary would be to simply enter BIOS after power down and turning it back on again, and changing the date there...

So, in summary: Arnie and his pals free themselves from a bunker themed escape room - using some very specific, sketchy, knowledge of how computers are supposed to work. I think at least one of them has played this before and isn't letting on.

I don't think I've seen any worse tech scene than this. At least double typing hacking war has some comedy to it but I can't even construct a imaginary world where any of what they're doing here would work or be necessary. And an alternative route for this scene to run without changing too much (Based on your description of the scene) is to have the computer do some kind of 2 hour long operation to open the door, and they need to keep the PC alive till then.

1. There was no 386 clone of the Soviet era, AFAIK. The last Intel CPU cloned in the USSR was 80286, but it wasn't mass-produced due to the low yield. 2. It is sometimes possible to power a 5V CPU from a 12V rail. There was an accelerator card for the Soviet Agat-9 computer. It used a 65C02 clone, overclocked from 2 to 5 MHz and powered from a 12V rail. Chip could stand it because it was military grade. But it took a very tricky circuitry to connect the CPU to the rest of the computer.

3:45 - I have this exact case on a PC I built. I can personally verify it was produced sometime between 1998 and 2000. It still houses a single-core 2.4 GHz AMD Celeron and its itty-bitty heatsink/fan combo. The curved blank plates are original, the flat ones are not from this case. (I'm oddly curious about the "small-time computer store" sticker beneath the power/HDD LEDs and wondering if, somehow, they're still in business today.) I've seen the pushbutton-eject used for both diskettes (man, if feels _good_ to use the word "diskette" again!) on a 5.25"/3.5" combo drive that fit in a single 5.25" bay, that was only once on a cheap pre-built. 4:21 - Where is the blue shadowing coming from, on this amber monochrome monitor? And since they're clearly using some fakery here, why didn't they adjust the amber text to be... gee, I dunno... AMBER?! 4:35 - I will give them credit, the translation isn't horrendous (according to Google Translate back to English, from a photo of my monitor during a freeze-frame): Door Climate Ventilation Power What do you choose? (door) Error hydraulics not "otvichant" What do you choose? (run diagnostics) Alert not responding Hydraulics, CO2 scrubbers, air conditioning I actually expected gibberish. I appreciate that someone actually took the time and effort in that small detail, but now that I see that, it makes the other errors much more egregious in comparison! 4:56 - HOLD UP. The door closed because a flare gun was shot at the door's FULLY OPEN control box. The Big Red Button in the control box won't respond. The control box is controlled by the computer that isn't even powered on when they enter the room. 3:27 the young lady pushes the RESET button on the panel - the power button is the larger one above it. The green power LED is not illuminated before she presses Reset, nor after she pushes Reset. And yet somehow crashing the computer - that again, WASN'T ON when she approached it, and we'll pretend that she actually turned it on - is going to repair the hydraulic system error and/or undo the damage to the control box from a flare. DO WRITERS EVEN READ WHAT THEY WROTE? What the actual frak! 5:52 - 🤣OMG... I can't... **wheeze** The external Apple floppy drive's cable sneaks across the table, and terminates underneath the monitor stand. Tower has only the line cable attached - not even the monitor! This "386" has onboard USB ports next to its PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse ports. 😆 Modem and Ethernet ports vacant, I don't see a WiFi card/dongle so this PC is communicating through hopes and wishes I guess. 6:10 - Tell me you know absolutely nothing about computers, without telling me you know absolutely nothing about computers. 6:38 - Yes, scanning the barcode off a power supply is 100% going to tell you the motherboard manufacturer, CPU, GPU, RAM, OS, and give you a detailed listing off attached storage devices. 🤦‍♂ There's so much more, but my brain is DONE. LOL

This isn't comedy... This is torture... Thank you so much for this video!

My dad was a gun nut and every time we watched a western or war movie he was always saying stuff like “that model Luger didn’t exist until 4 years later!” etc. I’m a techie but the dumb computer stuff in movies doesn’t bother me as much.

I love that NCIS clip, two people one keyboard, what were they typing? where were they typing? how did the computer know who was typing what?

that tin can would of been better used to fix the blown fuses on the doors control panel

It's been a few decades since I last coded my own operating system-level hardware routines on a 386 but I'm pretty sure my memory's solid on this, so here goes, just for fun: The date/time clock on a running system has *never* had anything to do with CPU speed on any machine I've ever heard of. Also, the physical real-time clock is actually not read very often (even on modern systems), mainly because it's SLOW. You can see the current RTC date/time in the BIOS config, and the OS grabs this at boot time (either from the BIOS or the RTC directly). Then, apart from specific triggers to re-read / update the RTC (eg for NTP sync) the OS simply counts ticks from one of the system timers to update the date/time in memory. For an old 386, this system timer would be IRQ0 (connected to the 8254 Programmable Interrupt Timer), which ticks at a default rate of (1193180/65536) =~ 18.2065 Hz, and as long as you're in Real Mode, it's extremely easy to change the IRQ0 tick rate with a few writes to ports 0x43 / 0x40. So a couple lines of asm in DEBUG.COM, or you could even do it in BASIC with the "OUT" command. You can therefore speed up the timer (maybe 1000-fold before the IRQ overhead starts to render the system unresponsive) with the result that the OS/system clock advances much faster than "real time". This behaviour persists until you run something else that reprograms the 8254 timer -- typically games, demos, music players; most other software doesn't touch it. That's all a bit over-complicated though. For our TV show plot, all you need to do is inject a batch command, before the bunker control software is launched, to *set the OS/system date* to 1999-12-31 or whatever, which in the 386 era was basically *always* possible to do. Then just reboot!

A 12mhz 386 with PCI slots sounds totally legit, guess I'll be checking Russian ebay listings later. In my experience, one would've been lucky to get a 386 with a Dallas RTC, most of the boards I worked with had explodey barrel batteries.

I am so glad I never tried watching this series. I would never have got to this point. I quite enjoyed my brain melting out of my ears.

Always hate shows and movies that never get the computing things right. Thanks for sharing

I dunno, maybe the Russian clone RTC had an external crystal and they managed to pump 40MHz into its 32kHz clock input. An RTC is just a pulse counter, after all, and even vintage ones of those are generally pretty forgiving when it comes to clock rate. The RTC crystal running over 1000 times faster than normal would certainly explain how the date advanced as fast as it did. Worst case scenario, the RTC can't keep up and freaks out which is what they want anyway. I dunno, maybe Y2K rollover would cause the system to notice time was going backwards and enter failsafe mode, opening all the doors. I still got nothing for how it triggered that to happen when the door controller was fried. Maybe it cut the power that was holding the door closed? I still got nothing for the soup can lid though. That's just idiotic.

To be fair, last time I was in Russia, just before the invasion of Ukraine, the internet on the Saint Petersburg metro (2nd deepest metro system in the world) was better than I get standing on my street in the UK. I can believe that the internet in a Russian bunker would be pretty decent :)

Off the top of my them getting trapped would make more sense if once they turned on the computer it closed the door that they turned on just out of curiosity. Have the computer run an automated script for a time lock, then have them try to figure out how to get the computer to think the time has elapsed and it should unlock the door without bothering with overclocking.

I actually really like the Text adventure idea you kind of skirted around at the end there.... I'd give the writers all the room they need to build conflict, could be a nice callback to older games, and not be completely ridiculous. They could spend the whole episode arguing about Russian words for the word "date," after they're all done yelling at each other someone sits down types something in, gets it working and is the hero..... Final scene "Hey what'd you type in?" "I realized one thing we didn't try...... 'date'" everyone laughs. The vibes of "That's so easy/stupid why did it work that way ARG?" from the old txt adventures is so strong there.

Requiring power to make the air breathable in something presumably built for a disaster scenario rather than having some basic ventilation sounds like a great idea.

The best bit about this whole video was the point about the CPU time keeping was purely based on speed.. so literally every time you did something that caused load the time would absolutely start slowing.. in a bunker where timekeeping is more valuable than currency if the Earth was in a nuclear war 😂😂

Fun video, you should do more of these!

Without joking. I wrote data in the RAM of a real time clock IC with some wires and three batteries i taped together (yes I used dip switches, a socket some wires and a perfboard. But that was for my convenience). I had to change some values the BIOS used. I could have set the time and date the same way.

Also, barcode scanners don't scan up and down. They just scan left to right. And on a phone, there is no red laser, it just uses the camera. I think they got everything wrong that they could get wrong.

There is another very important error in this one. As far as i know, a 386 didn't had any USB connections that can be seen at 05:51 and definitely no PCi slots seen briefly at 06:20.

Software that would reference the RTC at startup and then use the CPU for timekeeping after that were not entirely unheard of. But I don't think DOS on a 386 stuff ever worked like that. When dynamic downclocking for power saving started to become common, some software that used the rdtsc instruction would get super confused when the clock rate changed, because that basically just counts the number of CPU cycles that have happened since startup. The first CPU's that supported rdtsc couldn't change their clock speed at runtime, so you could just multiply the clock time by the number of cycles to get elapsed time. And this was way more accurate than the RTC. The normal PC RTC was accurate to ~ 1/1000 sec, but the cycle counting approach was more than 1000x more precise. Does any of this make the TV story make sense? No, of course not. But, you know, fictional Soviet clones are definitely magic. And the writers get points by Hollywood standards for having any concept of a clock inside a computer.

Arnie? In a streaming TV show? And look what we have here.

“I’m getting hacked!” Unplugs computer “no you’re not🤷🏻‍♂️”

3:03 They did all of that and the big red button that empties the hydraulics in an emergency was right there. Well, if it was an actual door that's the first thing you'd press on an emergency. Or, you know, just short a pair of wires.

I can't watch anything nowadays without catching the flaws in them, ... there was a phone number you could call out in Hollywood that if you caught a flaw and called it in you would get like a hundred bucks! 😱😁👍👍🇺🇲

When you were debunking the PC and also showing nothing was plugged in, you missed that it had PS2, USB and an onboard NIC. You also missed the PCI slots and the 3.5" drive bays. Even though the 3.5" form factor for HDD's did exist in the 80's, they weren't common, especially in the consumer space. 3.5" wasn't standardised until the 90's. Also, even granting that this "APP" worked and for some reason had Soviet Era parts in its database, scanning the PSU barcode would just give you information about the PSU, not the the rest of the PC.

It's kinda fascinating, that even 45 years later, we still have shows that don't even plug in the props. "You let the magic smoke out", it should be not working after a few seconds. If I had done the set dressing for this, I would have: - looked for a vintage 386 in a non-OEM case (which is probably what they did, but that's not a 386, that's an ATX chassis, so it's at least a Pentium II, and Pentium II's systems were not vulnerable to the Y2K bug.) - strip all the labels off the unit that will be in the shot (the fact that they even looked up the thing has to be a subtle joke (it literately says 1MB RAM 1.2MB floppy, so clearly a fabrication for television), no Russian pc's were sold in the west, and even if they did make it out, they'd be BK-0010's if they were Soviet Union era), the most likely scenario, is probably more accurate... it's a frankenbox western 386 running a Russian OS. Stickers on the keycaps is actually what is done to convert western keyboards to non-western ones (one company I did work for, had a few employees with Arabic sticker caps over the OEM dell keys, in 2020. I had to pry all of them off to reuse it.) - probably beat up the outside of the chassis a fair bit. The fact that it has a side panel tells me it's ATX as well. - fake the cable connections (eg connect USB and VGA extension cables to the back of the computer and... wait there isn't even a video card in this system...) - A Pentium II with a 5.25" floppy drive and a CD-ROM is not unheard of. I have one. But that was stuff I put together. Well past the point 5.25" drives were easily available. Like there is enough wrong in the set dressing, never mind anything else. It's also not unheard of to keep old hardware around for other purposes. Assuming this was even possibly real, as you pointed out, the door control would have been an independent system. If it was simply a control panel maybe I'd buy that. Now, if I wanted to "sell it" to techies, I'd actually have found a vintage PC/XT/AT, and a soviet-union era version of MS-DOS and just write some nonsense in BASIC. There is a clear reason why we never see the actors actually type with the screen visible. Because none of them know Cyrillic for real, so the "prop" is driven by production. So again, plug everything in for the shot, but actually drive the screen by production off-screen with the actors in front of it to sell it. Like nothing in this scene sells it to me, and would have only sold it if the Russians said "It potato, it not plugged in."

hey what is the specific track you're using for music? btw thank you for the entertaining analysis!

This vid was recommended to me. I would say yes do more of these for your channel growth. This type of content pulls in more views especially when you nail the titles like you did. It was a great video and I want to see more but until you do I will check out some of your other stuff. A lot of the more obscure channels I watch took off by having one good series to get you hooked. Don't waste it. Do more for your channel and for my amusement. When you pointed out the pc had no monitor plugged a laughed hard. I hadn't noticed.

I loved this!!!! Can't wait to see more in the series! Laughed a lot

It's up to your channel for this video. Looking forward to the rest of that rebuild as well.

It seems that whoever came up with the idea to design the Russian user interface didn't bother to double-check with anyone who can read Russian. For example, the date window showing the day, month, and year has a title translated as "dating," not in the date/time sense, but rather "Let's go for ice cream and move." Also, the phrase in the middle reads: "change the date," which is simply a prompt! Even the function keys are poorly translated, with F1 displaying only the word "top" in Cyrillic, which is not even a word in Russian. All the sentences in the UI and stickers are grammatically incorrect, especially for that era of history. At this point, Hollywood could easily hire any Russian teacher for a day or just buy them a nice dinner.

Hey! I learned something new! I didn't know there were 12MHz 386:s. I always thought they started @ 16MHz.

Excellently nerdy stuff - I’m so glad I’m not alone in this! The Russian is about as janky as the computer setup, too :). Talking of Russian, I’m in the UK and have just watched the excellent serial drama Litvinenko. And one point, however we’re in a police room with lots of computers and there are very clear shots of the rear of an in-use computer under a desk that has nothing at all plugged into it🤦🏻‍♂️

The MOST entertaining thing I learned. In the 1980's.. Was LEARNING, that a C64 was controlling the Lighting eyetem in an 8 story building in PTLD Down town. It monitored if someone was in the rooms, and turned them OFF, when there was no one there... Lasted for years.

Sorry for joining the party so late. Very nice video, I really had to lough a lot. And thank you for mentioning, glad that I was allowed to be part of it ;)

I actually had the same idea as that shopping aisle app years ago, but wrote it off because at least here in the uk every single shop has their stuff on different aisles and it would need to be crowdsourced to be accurate. It simply is not feasible. I wonder how many others had the same idea and wrote it off for the same reason.

The last time Hollywood got me annoyed was a Facts of Life episode, the shop's computer was used to turn on the neighbor's microwave (or was it the dishwasher?)

When my wife and I watched that episode, it fairly quickly became time for me to shut up. You've done a great job of covering it. To elaborate on your point about the built-in BIOS vs needing a DOS utility: The first machines that I saw with the ROM-based BIOS [setup utilities] were 286s, but not all of them (eg my first one used a [DOS] utility). I'm not aware of any 386s not having it in ROM. But I wouldn't be surprised to hear that that possibility existed.

4:20 15:22 speaking of pedantry 🙂 cyrillic is the writing system/alphabet. while knowing the alphabet is requisite in reading a language it's not yet sufficient (being able to read the latin alphabet doesn't make one able to understand english any more than norwegian). there's ~50 different languages that are mainly written in cyrillic.

That was painful to watch, and is why I much prefer the typical hollywood keyboard mashing. It's much easier to turn my brain off in that case. It gets filed under magic, and I don't need to know how it works. As long as the actors look competent doing it, it's all good. There's a Ukrainian channel that has a few soviet computers @ChernobylFamily .If anyone is curious about what they actually look like.

Hollywood gets nothing right, not history, not technology. I'm a vintage film camera geek, and remember watching a movie (name escapes me) where the heroine is looking through an old (1930's to 1950) Leica rangefinder. The movie then shows what she is looking at through the viewfinder, and simulates the appearance of a viewfinder from a 1970-ish single lens reflex, nothing at all like a vintage Leica. Most viewers wouldn't know or care but it came close to ruining the movie for me. Hollywood knows it doesn't really to get much right; the average movie-goer won't have a clue.

Actually, I'm betting the owner of that vintage equipment knew they would totally mess things up with the tech. I'm betting he included that Apple drive on purpose for people like us. Genius.

Lazy and not doing their homework is the MO for most hollywood writers period. They're on strike right now because they're being replaced by AI. I'm actively rooting for the AI. It can't be worse than what these writers do.

Huh...... it looks like they chose Greta Thunberg for the team's computer expert 😅🤣😂

Its pretty common for "subject experts" to cringe in pain when shows or movies includes the subject they are experts in. IT experts with anything PC/Tech, Lawyers with anything courtroom related, Soldiers/Marines/Airmen/Seamen and anything military-related, etc. The studios know that the normies won't know/realise there is problems, and some of the subject experts will hate-watch it, so they try and balance expected viewership loss with extra effort required (props, script-rewrites, etc.) and usually they decide the effort is not worth it.

This is an interesting video. I thought of some of the same things you did, but not as in depth. When they mentioned their problem my first thought was to go into the BIOS and change the date. When they got to the part where they removed the panel and there was a bar code, that was when I really shook my head.

If you don't know which aisle the item is on, how do you scan it?

lockpicking lawyer: " today we will use a magnet to open a bunker door " proceed to stick a magnet on the box and it open the door in 2 seconds

So what broke it for me was the structure was one or more of the following 1. It's 1989 & they have smart phones of the 2010+ era w/ full serviced & sped up internet & moderate AI Assisted search with database connections to all bar code scanners -- never mind that PCs, even clones will have multiple bar codes, 1 per part as only premium whole sellers of systems will have a barcode for a full build. 2. It's current day, and the bunker control system that is entirely controlling a very sensitive and supposedly secure location, is a 1980's era DOS PC clone, with modern parts. (as they are still made for various reasons) which would mean exceptional costs for .. literally no reason whatsoever. 3. The real answer of setting the time in the BIOS of the system and letting it tick over gets ignored in favor of techno babble. 4. that any modern day software, even for 1980 era HW would default to unlocked in the event of a date error in a secure application setting is moronic. 5. That even if the whole bit about OC the CPU would do anything, the fact remains the best OC those CPUs ever had was 200-300% OC'd and that was because of some pretty extensive mods, and at the cost of stability & compatability with many things. 6. That an indapendent control system was one something of the following - Connected directly to an computer in the open at all. - That said computer would be so insecure that accessing it while the bunker was in a locked down state wouldn't flip out security measures. - That There was literally no Software security at all on that system, and for a system that would have cost More money than most would want to think about, the lack of something like a fingerprint sensor for this application is flat out stupid. (not saying they aren't foolproof, but to say ... they are good enough and take preperation and time to break into) 7. That there isn't a fail safe built into the room in case the control box is out of order for w/e reason, in a SECURED BUNKER WITH ONLY ONE REAL WAY OUT. 8. That such a secured bunker that uses isolation like that wouldn't also be ... isolated from wireless signal transmissions. I can't enjoy some shows.. because it's just retarded as hell.

I remember back in the 80's when General Hospital was THE SHOW to watch in the afternoon. The characters had to guess at the password, which was two separate words. The computer accepted just the first word, and waited patiently for them to input the second word.

LOL... Tandy 1000 keyboard, 80's era machine with an ATX board, Apple II floppy drive, nothing plugged in, overclocking the CPU to advance the date, "MOAR POWER" as your clock frequency generator, CPU fan wire smoke, aluminum lid as a replacement?! I don't know exactly what was going on with the writers and production team, but the movie "Hackers" is hard computer science compared to this show's depiction of computers.

Are we not going to mention that the "control box" is a North American breaker panel with no wires, no cover, and a single red button stuffed into the corner? Of course, sticking a screwdriver into a contactor would be too easy.

IT Technician here, 1 there are USB, no 386 had USB ports, 2 there are PCI slots, no 386 had PCI slots. There would be no need to over-clock the CPU to change the date, it could easily have been done in the BIOS by setting it to December 31st 1999 and changing the clock to a second before midnight for the year 2000. God, I hate it when Hollywood writers write things about computers in TV shows and films, yet don't know the darn basics.

This reminds me about how the technicians, in the first 'Westworld' movie, died. In the movie, they ONLY door, to the computer room was locked, due to a computer malfunction. Buuut, the door had a WINDOW! I kept yelling, at the movie "Break the f***ing window! You bunch of idiots! 😣

A few things about Russian personal compters. If we are talking about the USSR (in the 80's): - there were very few IBM PC clones In the USSR / Eastern Bloc / COMECON countries - importing x86 processors/computers was illegal, only substitute available was the K1810VM86 (which is an Intel 8086 clone) - The USSR produced far more desktop PDP-11 clone models - For personal use there were Specturm clones, but as DIY hobbyist stuff for the eager electric engineers The availability of personal computers was very thin in the USSR in the 80's (think of like the mid 70's in the USA), their distribution was most likely state controlled, and their main use was scientific and educational. I doubt they would even utilize such high tech as computers for such bening task as controlling a door. If we are talking about Russia (after 1991) - IBM PC clones were the same whatever was available on the west ...for whoever could buy it in the times economic crisis - Thus there was the market open for domestic ZX Spectrum clone models, their heyday was in the 90's. Regardless of the availability of computers, there was no incentive to build bunkers anymore when the cold war was over.

The architecture of that "386" can never be a 386. 1: There were no CPU fan back then. 2: PCI were not invented. 3: ATX were not invented. 4: The case is a typical cheap early 00's era case and not a bulky late 80's steel case, build like a tank. Also.... Why do I get the impression that the female tech wizzard character, are based on Anthony from Linus Tech tip? It is so obvious that they needed something that appeal to young audience, by using familiarity and recognition.

It's not bad because it's that bad; it's bad because it really looks like they tried.

Small correction on the RTC thing: Even those old 8086 16 bit computers did have that RTC but it was only used during startup to get the current system time. Once the time was taken from the RTC, the computer kept on updating the time during run time in memory without asking the RTC all the time again. For this, a timer controller was used to create a timer interrupt about 18.2 times per second which was used to advance the in memory clock. This was done by the CPU however the interrupt was not bound to CPU speed in any ways. The thing with games when CPUs got faster was a sub-seconds timing thing. With like 25 or 30 frames per second, the timer couldn't be used so other means of slowing down was needed and the easiest way at that time was some loop counting like from 1 to 100k. But that loop (and all the other calculations the game had to do too) got faster, as the CPUs got faster. But that was never used to actually advance clocks at all.

I appreciate the scene from In the Dark where Josh asks Gene to enhance the CCTV footage, and he just says, "That's not a thing."

As someone who had assembled PC's from 80x286 to present day "trow pieces in and let them sort themselves up" motherboards, i can say that: 1.- CPU speed does not affect time and date. 2.- For changing date and time, you go to BIOS and set it, if you want to get extra resetty, you remove the battery and wait 30 seconds before replacing it. 3.- For overclocking on those motherboards (or just for correctly installing a CPU) you must locate three sets of jumpers, one for frequency, one for the multiplier and one for voltage, IE, your Texas Instruments 80x386 DX runs at a whopping 25 MHz and 1.2 Volts, you set frequency at 2.5 MHz, set the multiplier at 10X and the voltage at 1.2. Perhaps your mobo doesnt have the exact frecuency and multiplier... so you adjust to the nearest combination. For overclocking you adjust the frecuency and multiplier to the maximum stable combination, SLOWLY, increase a bit, test, increase a bit more, test.... and so on, and you can adjust the voltage sightly to improve stability... but putting jumpers in a wrong combination or trying to go too high can be a very fast way to fry a processor. 4.- Oh, and by the way, you also had to manually set jumpers to assign DMA and IRQ's for your add on cards. The situation in the show could be presented as a very interesting and intense one... you got an old mobo of soviet manufacture, you do not know the brand, there are no manuals online, You need to set pins to get into BIOS? What is the key to press to enter BIOS during boot? Perhaps is a cobination exclusive for that unknown brand. And if you MUST overclock..where are the pins and jumpers for frecuency? Are you doing your math right to calculate 40 MHz? What if you need a extra jumper cap to reach the necesary frequency? Would you need to take one from your HDD? Are you sure that it would still work without that jumper? And the most impossible of all missions... how you make a 386 era PC run without conecting ANYTHING except the power cord ? Most PC's wont even boot without a keyboard present.

I used to work at Tesco in the UK, and we had an app on our phones where we could scan a barcode, and it would tell us exactly where the product lives. It would show us aisle, shelf, mod/rack, and position. It would make it sooo much easier to find products!

"The boot disk isn't working!!!" "Have you tried demagnetizing it?" (uses static electricity from a sweater) "It works!!"

This is how TV Producers would treat Analytical Engines during the Victorian era 😮 .

another thing i found hilarious with the "hollywood's computer logic", is when someone decides to destroy a computer..., by destroying only the monitor 😅

4:06 I love the random upside down keycaps on that keyboard

about the rtc battery : it doesn't necessarily lead to an error or forces you to give the time, my PC1512 used to display a message like "F1 to set the time or F2 to continue boot with default values" and if i remember well it defaults to midnight (probably january 1St 1970 i.e. a 0 value for the time as i think it was using unix based timestamp despite being an amstrad PC but i can be wrong about that i was a kid at that time and didn't start my computer science studies yet)

Great videos, friend. I'm not even a tech expert but I did just build my first gaming PC last year and even I understood and was laughing at some of the silly misconceptions you explained from this show🤣🤣

I think decreasing the power to the rtc (not sure if shorting the power pins could work for this or if they’re diode protected) would (if you don’t fry it) cause it to flip bits so you could get lucky, but over powering would be unlikely to cause anything until it just stops working. In terms of the cpu, if they were able to increase the clock speed somehow, it would require more power, however, it’s unlikely it would still work at all if it was requiring more power than the motherboard of the era could handle. The lid as a conductor may have got confused somewhere along the way since it could help a little with thermal heat dissipation (helping overheating issues) but seems like a terrible idea as an electrical conductor… it would be much easier to go the cpu is overheating (not wires) and we need to cool it down so here’s a chunk of metal we can use.

2:10 Was just casually checking out this retro tech channel to see if it was another potential gem. Holding for our knowing Canadian laughter (+ any antipodal mountaineers who spent enough time in the Rockies) here earned you my Like/sub/comment. We're fond of Aussies + our NZ friends, too, & grateful. The ice climbing, snowboarding, skiing etc may draw them over for Canadian winters, but their Fire Crews have been & are currently in my province, working to save communities, biomes, + infrastructure. Hope the Crews stay safe.

I just love how in every movie/tv-show, when a computer gets a virus, the graphics starts glitching!!! So I know I've never had a virus on any of my computers.

Apart from not having a keyboard plugged into it, I noticed that the 1989-era PC had USB ports which weren't invented until 1996 -- and I don't think USB keyboards/mice came out until a couple of years after that, at least... But it's the Terminator, so time travel, I guess...

Back in the day, some games used the CPU clock to regulate the gameplay. Or more like, they used the time it took to complete an action as the pacing. So hitting the "turbo" button, or otherwise making it run faster than 1MHz, the game would play faster. I only remember it happening on 286, with games designed for the 8088. After that, programmers discovered they needed a better way to manage the speed of their games. Overclocking back in the 386 days was just a matter of flipping some dip switches, or moving some jumpers. I worked in a computer store when we were still building 386, 486, and finally Pentium machines. If we didn't set the jumpers (or DIP switches) right, the machines would run at the wrong speed. Or it wouldn't boot. I hadn't heard of this show yet, but thanks for making it clear that it isn't worth watching. It sounds like they're using the same writers or tech advisors that the show "Scorpion" used. Technically illiterate people who had misheard something once, and used it as a plot point.

It's fascinating. They tried to get the computer to crash, by triggering a Y2K-problem, but needed to cool the extremely overclocked computer so it wouldn't.... crash... 🤔

How does the cpu clockspeed affect the realtime clock again?

Awesome video! Please more like this