I love this movie -- it is simply my favorite Tracy/Hepburn movie. She was just a doll and he was his gruff, lovable self. And who knew they'd be right! Oh wait...

i wish i was out of work *sigh*

This film is great for the simple reason that it inverts the fear of loosing your job to a computer. Great stuff. Though I wish we had a giant twittering machine in my office. It'd make cataloging more fun if I got to input the data with switches.

This is one of my mother's favorite christmas movies.

Damn - if computers could put us out of work it'd be great, but only if they could fix that pesky NEED for work (for money, etc) before they do that...I wouldn't mind living in a world where computers did the "work" and left people with the free time to, you know, enjoy life. I know, I know, it's a pipe dream.

Even so, watching this clip makes me thank Wales for Wikipedia. ;)

HAHA!!! I LOVE old movies/tv shows showing computers doing things that they can't actually do.

In this case, the woman has the computer do the calculation by just typing in the question in.

And why did old timey computers always need they huge flashy lights? What purpose did they serve other than looking cool?

My computer doesn't have any banks of flashy lights, I got ripped off.

Why has my computer made more work for me?
It lets me do things in half the time. My bosses think it allows me to do it INSTANTLY, so adjust their demands accordingly.
I also suspect that they think it can read their minds as well...

This is amazing! I got this movie from the library just today. I would recommend everyone watch it. BTW, the computer did not make the calculation of "How much damage if done to the US forests annually by the Spruce Budworm," it cross-referenced a stored fact than had been previously encoded into memory. Really nothing significantly different from a Wikipedia search.
[en.wikipedia.org]

High-quality copy of that scene:
[www.megaupload.com]