
My Code Was in the Original Terminator Movie - fortran77
https://twitter.com/ThrillScience/status/1249742678532620293
======
tyingq
Other scenes have ASM from an Apple II. [https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-
images/Lifeandhealth/Pix...](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-
images/Lifeandhealth/Pix/pictures/2014/1/10/1389352492085/Code-in-The-
Terminator-008.jpg?width=300&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=e991a8810bf2bc310a77ddeae2ed4098)

~~~
jgrahamc
I break all those down in my video on The Terminator and its code:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRnnjoiSV-U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRnnjoiSV-U)
It's all from Nibble Magazine.

~~~
BrowserMeeting
Epic, John!

------
loser777
Slightly disappointed that this wasn't the 6502 assembly listings we saw in
the classic "Termovision" shots from the first movie ;)

~~~
MegaDeKay
Indeed! Came here to say the same thing. That code [0] was via Nibble
Magazine, which was pretty great back in the day.

[0] [https://www.pagetable.com/?p=64](https://www.pagetable.com/?p=64)

~~~
commandlinefan
Very kind of Skynet to include the English-language comments in the binary in
case somebody needs to step through it in a debugger.

~~~
jacobush
The Skynrt was probably all dreamt together in an adversial neural network.

------
wslh
At least the movie Sneakers was serious about the math:
[http://world.std.com/~reinhold/math/sneakers.adleman.html](http://world.std.com/~reinhold/math/sneakers.adleman.html)

------
Animats
That's close to "Hello World" in COBOL. Read a number and add it.

~~~
billsmithaustin
So it's true: when he's not killing people, the original Terminator processes
New Jersey unemployment insurance applications.

~~~
notjustanymike
No need to repeat yourself

------
kylek
Oblig-

[https://nmap.org/movies/](https://nmap.org/movies/)

------
judge2020
I was going to link to this on YouTube since I remember watching it for free,
but it seems they stopped providing it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fN82upbGPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fN82upbGPo)

[https://www.indiewire.com/2018/11/youtube-full-movies-
free-a...](https://www.indiewire.com/2018/11/youtube-full-movies-free-
ads-1202021659/)

------
simias
I've seen this website used in a bunch of TV shows these past few years:
[http://www.hackertyper.com/](http://www.hackertyper.com/)

According to `git blame` Alexey Dobriyan wrote most of that file so congrats
Alexey on your unexpected career as a TV prop guy!

------
thomascgalvin
So Skynet was written in COBOL. Explains why it was so angry, I guess.

~~~
Igelau
They had to send the Terminator back in time to circumvent Y2K

~~~
aforwardslash
If you're looking for a young guy working in cobol in the y2k vicinity, that
was me (19 at the time). not only I added 2 more digits to some microfocus
app, I also saved the world :) My first professional gig was with cobol, and
it was almost cool.

~~~
ArnieApproves
We salute you. Thanks for saving the world; to all greater y2k saveaists. What
an unseen fix, you guys, all you y2k fixers, I mean, really did it. Thanks
man(s).

man s might also mean women etc whatever all the new forms of people and
identities goes on. We salute everyone.

------
RickJWagner
Wow, the Terminator was powered by a "Hello World" COBOL application?

Think what it could do with some real code behind it!

~~~
JdeBP
Think what it could have done had it used PL/I-80, the immediately preceding
listing in the magazine article, which benchmarked faster.

Or indeed, per the magazine benchmark test results, BASIC. (-:

------
takeda
So T-800 was written in Cobol? :/

------
jgrahamc
Happy ending to my YouTube video on where all the code came from in The
Terminator. I tracked down the author of one piece and emailed him out of the
blue.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRnnjoiSV-U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRnnjoiSV-U)

Here's the code:
[https://gist.github.com/jgrahamc/9a90399f39926857b19e8635b30...](https://gist.github.com/jgrahamc/9a90399f39926857b19e8635b30a3ebd)

~~~
e12e
And the magazine article (mentioned in the Twitter thread - "Dr digital" page
98 - 73 magazine 1984):

[https://archive.org/details/73-magazine-1984-05/page/n97/mod...](https://archive.org/details/73-magazine-1984-05/page/n97/mode/1up)

The online version is pretty much unreadable for me on Firefox/mobile, but the
Pdf is ok:

[https://archive.org/download/73-magazine-1984-05/05_May_1984...](https://archive.org/download/73-magazine-1984-05/05_May_1984.pdf)

Ed: corrected link. The article itself would be a great hn submission - a
comparison of time (writing+execution) of a simple program in basic, Pascal
and cobol..

~~~
yanowitz
Came to say the same thing. Fascinating look into a time machine—what problems
are we still wrestling with and what celebrated innovations then do we see as
problematic legacies now (e.g., when a language allows 1 + ‘1’ to equal 2)?
Very fun read.

------
_bxg1
> I remember seeing the movie and thinking "HA! Robots from the future use
> COBOL". Sadly, this may turn out to be true.

Turns out COBOL was a failsafe against the robot apocalypse

------
VirtualAirwaves
What a great find! I guess back then, they didn't think too much about the
"rights" for a fragment of code lifted from a magazine. I don't think movie
studios would do this today.

~~~
dang
Please don't use multiple accounts to comment on or vote for your own posts.
You succeeded in getting this perfectly good submission buried by our
software. I had to manually restore it.

~~~
0xff00ffee
Did the IPs match or something? How did you know it was multiple accounts?

~~~
dang
Unfortunately I can't talk about the details of that without making it easier
for people to break the rules. Sorry to disappoint.

~~~
ArnieApproves
You should make a biography about what it took [you] to moderate HN once this
site blows over, then you can just spill anything, man. Insert Deity; I guess
this is hard work; or some wayfaring good algorithms.

Thanks man. I'll troll less, knowing how much dung (huh) you're in daily.

Please write the tricks once HN goes under or whatever.

~~~
dang
I appreciate that! also, I don't think I've seen that inflection of dang
before.

It would be nice if HN continued beyond all of us, though. Sounds grandiose
and dumb, but why not? There's already a rich archive (a dozen years' worth
and counting) and the site has certain properties that prevent it from growing
too much.

Maybe eventually we (or our successors) will come up with an anti-abuse system
that makes the current one obsolete and then we can publish the old one and HN
can have a retro thread about it, like about 1980s Lisp AI programs.

~~~
0xff00ffee
> a retro thread about it, like about 1980s Lisp AI programs

LOL. Be careful what you wish for...

------
strategarius
HR: tell me about the most exciting project you did. Me, Senior Developer in
Cyberdine: actually, T-800, despite of our customer insisted on using Cobol

