It’s hardly uncommon for a character to sit at a machine that looks like it could comfortably power an electricity grid, while running a Bombermine server in the background, only to see text appearing on a character by character basis. Seriously: when was the last time anyone used a computer that did this, when it wasn’t doing it for effect? Here’s hoping no major movie character gets their hands on a Kindle anytime soon.

And while we’re on the subject…

Text makes a noise as it appears on the screen too

Unless it’s one of those days where we’ve, er, got a bit of a noisy advert on the site (sorry about those, bills to pay), when things appear on a computer screen, they do it with stealth. They sneak in, silently, and magically appear before your eyes. Just like letters from RoboCop’s legal department.

Not in the movies though. Even when there’s no obvious audio device connected, computers go about their everyday work with as much irrelevant and useless noise as they can muster. In Torchwood: Miracle Day, every computer scrolled text onto the screen, and made some noise akin to lots of mice nibbling on cardboard as it did so. Lots of movies do it too, as if it’s adding some drama to the proceedings. It isn’t, of course. It just makes us wonder what the salesperson at PC World told them when buying the bloody computers in the first place.

They all have really fancy graphical user interfaces

We know not what operating system the computers of the movies tend to use, but we’ve not seen one film where the hero is staring at a circling hour glass, hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del, to end a process tree or generally waiting for Windows/MacOS to bugger around for a bit. In the likes of 24, to be fair, the operating system looked awesome. And in Skyfall, the computers under the stewardship of Ben Whishaw’s Q made it look as though MI6 had a sideline going in operating system design. None of it looked in the remotest bit useable in any practical way, of course. But the days of a bit of Unix in Jurassic Park look long gone…

They have security, but no security that can’t be cracked in a minute