The Terminator Terminates On Apple II+

The Apple was powerful enough to run Oregon Trail, but was it powerful enough to send man-killing cyborgs back in time to eliminate futuristic human resistance leaders in ttero. Well, I guess.

According to Mark Simonson in an oldie-but-goodie on his blog, the eponymous murdering cyborg of 1984's The Terminator was running a core program sourced in the commands of the Apple++:

In case you don’t recognize it (and, unless you are a regular Slashdot reader, why would you?), the highly technical looking computer readouts in [The Terminator's] vision display are actually source code printouts for an Apple II+ program that ran in a computer magazine (Nibble) in the early 1980s. Plus, it looks like it was printed on a daisywheel printer. Also used were listings of COBOL programs. COBOL was once a popular computer language for writing accounting software.

Of course, recent movies have retconned the notion that the Terminator runs on an Apple II+: Terminator 3 establishes that Skynet is not based upon a single overclocked Apple II, but is instead a bit of distributed computing, the SETI@Home of human genocide.

The Apple Terminator II+ [Mark Simonson]