I hate to be a nitpicker, but they weren’t. There was the Interociter in This Island Earth, but I don’t recall any computers being shown at all.
Forbidden Planet famously had Robby, the Robot, of course, and a decently working robot has to be a good computer, as well. But Robby was a unique specimen “beyond all earth’s physical sciences”, built by Morbius. It’s notable that all of the equipment on board Star Cruiser C57D is conspicuously lacking in computers – it’s part of that Analog Future that was the staple of 1940s science fiction (and I’ve argued before that FP is the embodiment of 1940s pulp fiction). Even the Krel machines, although they are stated to be self-repairing and self-operating, don’t seem to act like computers – they’re more like 1940s-era automatic mechanisms. The Krel automatic desktop looks and acts more like a period microfilm reader than a present-day e-book.
If you want to see Robby in a film with the 1950s vision of a computer, you need to look at the little-known black and white sequel to Forbidden Planet, The Invisible Boy:
By the way, there’s no reason to turn to these iffy films for computers – there were plenty of low-budget science fiction films in the 1950s that featured large-scale room-filling computers
Not that I recall, but I wasn’t answering the OP – I was correcting what I saw as an error by a later poster.
With the references to computers in films in the fifties (Desk Set, The Invisible Boy, The Fly, Kronos, etc.) and the stories about the accomplishments of Univac and the IBM machines, you’d think there would be several songs mentioning them in the 1950s.
It occurred to me that fan-based filk songs might offer an early example of a computer song. Certainly there were filk songs (if not yet called by that name) in the 1950s. I’m at work, and haven’t got the time to look through them and find dates, but here’s an internet filk archive of computer-based songs, if anyone’s interested.
It’s a much later entry, but Richard and Robert Sherman (the soingwriting brothers who did a lot of stuff for Disney, most notably the theme for The Wonderful World of Color and the score for Mary Poppins) did The Computer Song for Disney. Sadly, it didn’t come out until as late as 1982:
This is definitely a stretch, but has to be a benchmark of sorts.
Jacques Offenbach’s famous opéra fantastique Tales of Hoffman includes a segment (Act I – “Olympia”) based on E.T.A. Hoffman’s story The Sandman it concerns Olympia, an automaton that the hero falls in love with, unaware that it’s essentially a robot. There are many siongs, including “Une poupée aux yeux d’émail” – A doll with enamel eyes
The opera was first performed in 1851. A famous film of it was released a century later in 1951.
Oh cool, just like your other links. Thanks CalMeacham. I have E.T.A. Hoffmann’s collection of stories “Nachtstücke” including “Der Sandmann” on my kindle, but haven’t got around to reading it yet. I’ve read his “Die Elixiere des Teufels” years ago, and that was some strange but great stuff. Feel inspired now to catch up on “Nachtstücke”.
