Over the weekend, I was looking for a film to watch and discovered that Electric Dreams was available via YouTube:

I am a little bit cautious about issues of copyright but, since the film has been up there for some time without a takedown and since it isn’t available on DVD or online services like Netflix (I’ve looked), I decided it was reasonable to give it a spin.

It was probably 1984 when I last saw it, which was the original cinematic release, and I don’t think I have seen it since then but something about it lodged in my mind. It might have been the sound track but could also have been the dream of an intelligent computer. I don’t think that some of the things suggested are easy today and, even in the elements that aren’t pure fantasy, I’m very doubtful about whether you could have bought that kind of stuff off the shelf in the early 1980s. Even the pre-champagne infused processor seems well beyond the kind of computer power I remember then (like simply being able to get your computer to control all your household appliances by using special adaptors on your power sockets).

Some of those things are more feasible now though – I’d love to know more about what was factual when the film was released and what were prescient imaginings of the writers. Meanwhile, worth a pop, especially if you remember computing in 1984.