John Siracusa

This is not my rule.

This is directly from the video, which is just a rule of thumb for theater people.

Apparently that math works out.

I think it was perfectly clear because I gave the example.

So 4.9 millimeters, does that mean nine feet away?

But my bad for not putting the words in feet in there.

And as I say here in the notes, a lot of listeners are now very unit sensitive.

Thanks to Casey.

So, I mean, what we're talking about is in the movie War Games in the big room with all the screens that show, like, the lines with the missiles exploding and stuff.

Those are the screens we're talking about.

It's like, how did they do that back in 1980-whatever when this was made?

Well, they did it with the thing you're going to see on Dave's Garage channel.

It's a vector display.

And, of course, it's very tiny, and it's monochrome.

So how did they do those big things?

This is not really about how they made the movie, but just my understanding is that they got these little vector displays.

They filmed them with a film camera, and they filmed –

different images and with different color filters in front of the monochrome screen so they got a red pass and a blue pass and a green whatever whatever colors they use like you see colors in the movie that's just because they put different images and they filmed it with a film camera and then they put that film together and then they projected onto projection screens and then they filmed the projection screens with the movie camera so it's a it's quite a ways to go but you know without computers they can do graphics that big but anyway the vector display itself is like i don't know it's like

seven inches diagonal or something it's a tiny it looks like an oscilloscope screen practically but vector displays are really cool and getting it up and running is really cool that's really what the video is about is so i bought one of these these war games displays on youtube again they're not war games displays but they're used for the movie how do i get it to do literally anything and it was a fun video it was very well done and you know the dave fellow was like i'm not a developer but let me tell you about the low level programming i had to do in the communication protocol i had to work through in order to get this to work it was very impressive

Yeah, and again, I think our batting average is really high, and IKC is like 99% of the time is always remembering to do it.