Engineering on Friday ‘toon: Wizarding World of Development

My son said I should draw something Harry Potter-themed. Something with electronics and wands.

So, I thought, what if all of the magic from that wizarding world was really just electronics? Do you remember that scene where the main characters were having issues with the "leviosa" spell? This is my interpretation.

Also... I wanted to add my favorite laptop, the "Grid Compass 1137," complete with its yellow electroluminescent screen. I doubt anyone will notice that.

I've been on a decades-long quest to get one of those laptops. Searching, waiting, giving up at times. But I kept reminding myself of how novel an electroluminescent screen was. It was incredibly heavy, but also was equally rugged.

More importantly, though, it was featured in a pivotal scene in the 1986 movie Aliens. Actually, the scene wasn't in the theatrical release, but made its first appearance in the unsurpassed television edit.

In the scene, the aliens were attempting to breach where our space marines were holding up. The laptops controlled the remote sentries they set up. Four sentries. You can watch the sentries taking out the baddies, while the laptops show the sentry specs and ammo counters depleting.

Take a look. I queued it up to the first appearance of those laptops:

And that was the end of those laptops' grand performance. The scene made such an impact on me that here I am still talking about it. I continue to maintain that Aliens is in the top 5 greatest action films to this day.

FYI, there's already a community of superfans that recreated the sentry software. The look of it, at least. So, I’m ready.

But truth time: All that waiting and I chickened out. Two Grid Compass 1139s (upgrade to the 1137) went up for auction recently. Both sold for over $2,000 dollars. Honestly, I just couldn't justify the price. Especially since I would have to rebuild both. They both use bubble memory, a soldered-on CMOS battery, a flaky BIOS because of it, and a special version of DOS by Grid. I guess I was hoping for one at $500 or so. I see that hope is gone. Unless I start saving up.

I mean, most of my cars cost less than 2k!

On a related note, I've been trying to find a modern interface electroluminescent screen out there. Or even older interfaces like MDA/Hercules, CGA or VGA. Something standalone that I don’t have to wire up and adapt myself. My dream is to run a Pi, Arduino, whatever with one of those screens. If you all know of one, send me a message!

Thanks!

P.S. Just mentioning Hercules screens has me wanting one again. They looked so delicious.