This week on Tech Film Noir, we're watching Weird Science (1985), John Hughes's hormone-fueled Frankenstein story that asked the ultimate 80s question: can a half-megabyte of RAM generate the perfect woman?

Join Lianne Potter, Simon Painter, and Jeff Watkins as they revisit a cinematic fever dream where two desperate teenagers bypass actual coding in favor of a acoustic coupler and a ceremonial bra on the head.

Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith star as Gary and Wyatt, two nerds who hook up a Memotech MTX500 to a government mainframe and accidentally invent an AI girlfriend. Kelly LeBrock stars as Lisa, a magical digital genie who operates entirely on teenage logic, while the film hilariously sidesteps real tech to ask if feeding magazine clippings into a scanner can actually spawn human life (but to be fair, it isn’t much different to the frontier AI companies scanning books!).

Along the way, we break down the elite 80s hardware on display: from Casio CA-90 calculator watches to massive 8-inch floppy disks. We also dig into the slightly terrifying modern reality of AI companion forums, the charm of primitive wireframe 3D graphics, and the timeless tech-support troubleshooting method of just smashing a CRT monitor with a baseball bat.

When movies guess the future, we check their work.


Big shout out to the This Aged Great Podcast and the Starring the Computer website

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