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Superman III (1983) (part 2 of 6)
Several students at the “Archibald Data Processing School” have witnessed the mayhem from a window. Inside, we see a small chalkboard and students hard at work on several computer terminals, and Gus Gorman is among them. A female student whose face isn’t shown asks the instructor a question, and her line is clumsily looped in. “Excuse me, but what if, uh, you want to program two bilateral coordinates at the same time?” The teacher calls this “impossible” but Gus nervously raises his hand. “Sir?” He shows the commands on his screen and types a few keys. Of course, this computer is one of the first personal models ever made and it’s hard to be impressed by flashing green text. [Editor’s Note: And as a programmer, I have to step in here and point out that Gus is programming in BASIC, and his entire program is nothing but PRINT statements. Actually, they’re mostly empty PRINT statements, meaning Gus has just written a very complex program that will display… absolutely nothing. —Albert]
Nevertheless, it does the trick for the teacher, who exclaims, “Good Lord, how did you do that?” A bewildered Gus says, “I don’t know! I just did it!” Ha ha! Those crazy black people! One minute they’re mooching welfare, the next they’re programming wizards. You never know what they’ll do next.
10 PRINT “THIS MOVIE SUCKS”;
20 GOTO 10
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Jessica Ritchey
Born in Western North Carolina, Juniper was discovered in a filthy shack in the lovely Blue Ridge Mountains, speaking a made up language to a tattered rag doll, her only companion. Her social skills have improved little in the intervening years. She is currently making flailing efforts at being a freelance writer. One of history's supreme procrastinators she plans on writing a book about it someday.
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