Just curious what the first, or the first few “computers” ever featured on film looked like.
Any ideas?
The earliest movie I can think of where a computer played a key role is Billion Dollar Brain, a 1967 spy film. I suspect there’s likely earlier ones, though.
Oldest I can think of is Desk Set (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0050307) from 1957. There, it’s a big box with blinking lights and a couple of tape reels.
Jumped the post button a bit early. As I recall it looked like the traditional box with flashing light that innumerable b-films used to stand in for computers.
Metropolis (1927) featured a robot. Does that count?
If I recall, the 1933 comedy short Techno-Crazy features some sort of computeresque creation.
Metropolis (in the recent restoration) also has a number of control consoles that organize data and generate reports and such, so I think that certainly counts.
I suppose you mean specifically an all-electronic digital computer. Mechanical calculators, which are in their own way computers, are seen often enough in scenes involving accountants in movies of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
It’s interseting to note that in 1964, when Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick began writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its artifical intelligence theme, the most powerful computer in the world, at the University of Illinois, had all of 5 megabytes of RAM. Today a lot of toys have more RAM.