Screen Art
The HP 9845 not only promoted CRT displays as standard interactive visualization device for desktop computers, it also was capable of (compared to other systems of the time) tremendous computer graphics.
The HP 9845C was the very first color computer developed by Hewlett Packard and extended the visualization possibilities even further. It offered hardware accelerated vector drawing and polygon fill features, and even supported fast matrix operations for rendering 3D models. HP spent lots of design efforts in building high-quality, ergonomic display systems. Therefore, although mainly targeted to scientific and engineering applications, the 9845C was a multi-purpose graphics wonder.
This section shows a couple of examples, which shall give an idea, what the HP 9845 could do, and how it was used.
The War Games Movie
The best-known application of an HP 9845C outside the scientific and engineering scene probably was John Badhams "War Games" from 1983.
The story is about David Lightman (starring Matthew Broderick), a high school student and computer hacker, who uses his IMSAI equipment to break via the public phone system into the high school computer in order to adjust his school grades. One day he logs into an unknown computer system via backdoor password, not realizing, that he is in a NORAD military artificial intelligence computer system called WOPR, which, as an attack detection and response control system, is connected to the ICBM nuclear weapon system of the U.S.
David Lightman hacking into NORAD
Assuming a kind of computer game, he initiates a "thermo nuclear war" scenario, which leads NORAD to believe the U.S. is really under attack by a soviet nuclear strike. In the very last moment, the World War III can be prevented by showing WOPR, that in a thermo nuclear scenario, no "player" can win, independent whether he strikes first or responds to a first strike.
The movie was technically brillant and commercially successful, and - although the IMSAI 8080 showed in the film already wasn't state of the art any more - became famous for the hacker techniques showed in the movie. However, there were also other computer systems invloved which are the "hidden stars" of War Games. A considerable share of the movie budget was spent on building the impressive NORAD set, and one of the most important features are the large projection screens which were used for operation controls. All computer graphics visualization projected on those screens were produced with an HP 9845C system.
NORAD Movie Set with Projection Screens
This was due to the fact, that Colin Cantwell, responsible as a consultant for the computer graphics design, also had a relationship to the Hewlett-Packard company, who then lent the 9845C system for the production of the screens. The special effects team built their own film recorders and file management system to control the production of about 50,000 feet of negative material.
A discussion of the computer background can be found under the following link:
Below are 9845C produced scenes taken from the movie.
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