CDC Cyber 180 in Die Hard (1988)
The Cybers are located in the building's computer room, along with a fibreglass mock-up of an ETA-10 supercomputer.
Their only purpose appears to be shielding John from a hail of bullets.
Why does this building require so many supercomputers?
Mark Garrett
"realism: Why does this building..." nothing to do with the building many office blocks contain data centres for the various uses by the companies that occupy the building. I think the question would be how poor a shield they would make and how explosive a hard drive might be released by a shattering bullet :)
2010-07-06 09:34
Dr Kush
I can answer why this place has so many supercomputers, this movie was made when CDC hit upon hard times and these series of computers were failures because of the emergence of mini and microcomputers on the scene. Which were capable of doing the essential tasks that had traditionally been done by mainframes at a much lower costs, the filmmakers were likely able to acquire the frames of the computer systems rather cheaply to make it look like a real data center. At the time this movie came out I worked at a university data center which housed these systems including the ETA-10, so it was a big reason many of us went to see the movie.
2017-07-26 13:07
Neville Ross
I'm guessing, this is the headquarters of a big corporation and they need the computers shown here.
2015-01-21 00:05
JR
This was actually a paid product placement by Control Data. The fairly new head of the Computer Products Group, who formerly lived in California,thought this would be great advertising for a failing product. He was gone soon afterward.
2018-09-03 06:40
Isaac Johnson
I ran into a senior manager at a Control Data reunion picnic. According to him, we had those in LA for a trade show. The production company's first pick backed out at the last minute and we (CDC) were not planning to ship them out right away. They made a last minute deal to use our Cybers in the movie (no one new back then Die Hard would be such a hit.. they did not have a huge budget). (I personally was a CDC employee from 1996 to 1998/99)
2022-05-02 12:51
Jay
Where would someone find buy an old Cyber 180 in the present day?
2023-01-13 15:03