• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Hello I'M LOOKING FOR 75 COMPUTERS FOR PERIOD (1990-92) MARTIN SCORSESE MOVIE !!HELP

K

kris

New Member
Joined
Oct 15, 2012
Messages
6
Hello hello

i'm working in the set dressing dept on a film that takes place in the 90's
sept 1990 - oct 1992.

So i am looking to buy computers that would have been working in an office at that time - this is a wall street type of office.

Any leads,clues ideas or links greatly appreciated

i can be reached at krismoran@gmail.com

thank you very much!

Kris moran
 
Literally office machines cases and those are plenty on the web, however at the time we still had only AT style cases and make sure you look for identical cases for a more clear and clean finish.
If you need a working system you can get away with using dos plus their appropriate financial programs.
If you need a running system you can cheat as long as you do not require to boot that system in a scene since POST is a dead give away if it's a system from a later period.(some programs show available memory try to evade those)

I wouldn't know what would have been have been mandatory
 
Is this a spam bot setup ? I'd kinda think Kris Moran would have peeps who do this sorta thing, or an email address connected with a Hollywood studio. (No offense)
patscc
 
patscc said:
Is this a spam bot setup ? I'd kinda think Kris Moran would have peeps who do this sorta thing, or an email address connected with a Hollywood studio. (No offense)
patscc
Click to expand...
It's possible, but I think she's real because 1) What would she have to gain by asking such a specific question and 2) Her name checks out on IMDB as a Set Director: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0602901/ and 3) Martin Scorsese has a movie called "The Wolf of Wall Street" coming in 2013.
 
Last edited:
i do need these things and what is "AT style"

i do need these things and what is "AT style"

thank you, thank you for responding

I have been looking for CRT monitors that would pass. thought this might be easy but can't even find them in big numbers.

i have 2 scenes in Nov 1990 - Oct 1991
then more scenes that take place between Oct 92 - Aug 1995

guess they would all be set up to mainframe - so only need monitors and keyboards but yes they do have to work - or a lot of them do.
i have not found a source with multiples in one place for even the cases.

what do you think would be the main computer in the office

for the 80's scenes we had 40 Quotron cases fabricated/copied. - big bucks then someone put in the blk and green inventory warehouse monitor guts in it. Big production.
thought i might be able to bypass that since it is not so early -
and actually its not 55 could be closer to double that

so yea i'm all ears

this is good info!
 
so they are running systems?
AFAIK as long as you can connect a floppy disk drive inside you can run dos so and modern motherboard should do the trick if it has a FDC onboard.(Minimal system and all)
don't make a shot with the back plane of a case visible if you go for the above.

I know banks currently use FPGA's for most parallel processes, but wall street i don't know what they use right now.

Back in the 90's mainframes VAX comes to mind, What did Big Blue ran at the time guys?

AT style is a form factor that came before ATX, one of the most frequent features of such a case is the Big round hole for the keyboard connector on the back plane, the power switch was most of the times Inside the Power supply unit, which requires a rod running from the front panel to the back where the PSU is.
Oh, and it's nearly always Beige or another shade of white.

I am not usually about esthetics unless it comes to hardware design.
 
Last edited:
What part of the world are you located? There are some vintage computer museums that offer such services although I have no idea what price they look for or if they'd have that number of identical looking systems. Depending on your location (although I doubt Texas) I or others here might know of folks in that area who might have a collection for use. I'm a bit surprised though if you'd really need that many on the screen at one time vs just moving them around for different shots.

You might even try searching some local government liquidation sites for pallets of computers but it'd be up to you all to figure out if they were around that old. Usually you'll find pallets of newer systems for cheap but older might be difficult.
 
kris said:
what do you think would be the main computer in the office
Click to expand...

Sun, but these would be in the back room. Are you shure the traders were using PCs?
The big traders on Wall Street were running on Sun equipment by the late 80's and 90's.
 
GovDeals.com is a good place to look. Just get a truck load of beige boxes, CRT monitors & keyboards. They occasionally will have Sun equipment as well, but it will all be as-is, not working. And of course, the higher you are up the food chain, the bigger the monitor. You can show someone is a peon by putting a 12" monitor on their desk and give the big boss a 20 or 24" monster. :)
 
GovDeals! I heard about that one after I won a 386 machine at the semi-local UT surplus auction. UT had and probably at their next auction will have many pallets of computers, and they go at cheap prices too. And there's also Public Surplus's site.

But as previously asked, where abouts are you located? There may be localized surplus auctions where you are.
 
thanks ill check it out - govdeals.com - ill let you know how it goes!
 
great Ian thanks! thats a good one
Im in NYC - try not to hold it against me
 
cool copy that - do you think blk computers would have been in by '94? they are in the mags - i assumed but great to know if they were not main stream at this point.
 
I in the early 90s I used to work for a company that wrote Technical Analysis trader's software for Reuters, and in the mid-90s worked for their competitors Dow Jones Telerate also on trader's applications. As far as my hazy memory can recall, traders using Reuters feeds in the late 1980s-early 90s timeframe generally used the bog-standard Reuters Terminal which was a monochrome green screen console with a keyboard laid out in a rectangular fashion with some coloured keycaps. Sorry I can't find a photo of it through Google right now. Later the ART Advanced Reuter Terminal was used. In 1991 / 1992 our TA software ran on PC-AT 286 boxen (and the ART) running a custom multitasking windowing system that looked very, very, very similar to the Windows 2.0 UI and took the Reuter feed to plot realtime graphics. I have a product brochure we released, with screenshots somewhere in my collection.

At Dow Jones Telerate in 1994 or thereabouts we also did analytics software on Win 3.x I recall we did have a Sun workstation in the office but that wasn't used for anything trading-related. Generally the Telerate boxen were generic 386(? from memory) PCs with a hard drive and 3-1/2" floppy, and fitted with a custom Telerate feed card, and they also had a bunch of Intel Panthers (circa 1991 or 1992 I think). A lot of old gear was chucked in the mid 90s, I still have a Panther I collected (a really beautiful pizza box machine, absolutely lovely quality hardware!) and one of the custom feed cards somewhere. All this equipment was beige in colour, except I think the old RT was black or some other dark colour.

At the time Bloomberg was one of our competitors, they must have had similar capability equipment.

Steve.
 
Last edited:
kris said:
cool copy that - do you think blk computers would have been in by '94? they are in the mags - i assumed but great to know if they were not main stream at this point.
Click to expand...

There were black computers in the '90s but they were rare. The massive shift from beige to black for all PCs, including business models, occurred around the year 2000. In retrospect, it may have been a reaction to the "stylish" colors that Macintosh computers at the time were using, beginning with the iMac in 1998.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top