I know most or at least a good portion of you thought Johnny Mnemonic was so much trash. However, I like the cyber-punk sub-genre and on top of that, I like William Gibson's style. I first read the short story in OMNI magazine in '81 and was floored. At that time I was just starting to play around with computers. Most of what I could store was on audio tape which I might remind you was a major upgrade from paper tape. A machine running a 1mhz with 4kb of RAM was a serious piece of machinery. The thought that you could have 128kb and store data on 360kb disks was still a bit off. So here is this story where Johnny could store GIGABYTES mind you in his HEAD! Well that was just plain fantastic! then the movie came out in the late 90s when you could get a gigabyte drive without taking out a house loan, the though still of all that storage, SMALL enough to fit in your head was still major geekiness. So what is my problem? No, it's not realizing that Reeves can not act, it was a simple throwaway line in the movie that I again watched last night. Johnny is trying to escape from someone bent on taking his head off. He finds himself in the sewers having weird flashes as the data in his head starts leaking. When asked what is happening to him, he replies "I got this implant that can store 80gig in my head, 160 if I use a doubler" and the movie instantly became quaint. Why? I just took an 80 gig drive out of my "play" computer and threw in a 160gig why? because the 160 was dead cheap and was "old" pata tech. So, Johnny went from being uber cool to being a cheap hack geek using discoed ots trash. Sigh......
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