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Movie Gadget Friday: Johnny Mnemonic
Ariel Waldman contributes Movie Gadget Friday, where she highlights the lovable and lame gadgets from the world of cinema.For last week's installment of Movie Gadget Friday, we featured a two-part look at 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, in honor of the late great Arthur C. Clarke. This week we fast forward a few more years to 2021 in the "cyberpunk" world of Johnny Mnemonic. The gadgets are as hilariously lame as the lines, which likely led this 1995 film to its mixed reviews, and Keanu to his later role as Neo. From fax machines to Zip Disk-like passports, we can only hope the future of technology doesn't look this grim. Wet-wired brain implant and memory doublerShoved into the back of his skull and wet-wired to his brain, Johnny comes equipped with a shockingly small 80GB chunk of memory capable of smugging data between international borders. An input for a standard headphone jack is located at the back of his head and serves as the only port for uploads -- which are pretty painful. New data can be accepted from seemingly any source connecting to the input, however, MiniDiscs appear to be smugglers' preference thanks to their easy ability to be burned once an upload is complete. (This is key when expecting a mob with machine guns to show up at any minute.) Thankfully, individually-wrapped memory doublers can help boost implant storage capacity for double the data smuggling -- we hope it uses lossless compression. Unfortunately, instead of receiving an error for exceeding capacity, anyone with an overloaded brain implant risks certain death within a couple days by the resulting synaptic seepage. More after the break.
