Hacker Cinema
Marooned
1969 · Film · 134 min
Directed by John Sturges
After spending several months in an orbiting lab, three astronauts prepare to return to Earth only to find their de-orbit thrusters won't activate. After initially thinking they might have to abandon them in orbit, NASA decides to launch a daring rescue. Their plans are complicated by a hurricane headed towards the launch site—and a shrinking air supply in the astronauts' capsule.
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You launch in the eye of the hurricane:
"Marooned" m.imdb.com/title/tt0064639/
I used one of those as an undergrad. It was really a programmable calculator. It was incredibly slow for an all-electronic device; square roots took seconds. You could write simple programs for it and get homework done, though.
It was beautiful. Olivetti had great industrial design in the 1960s and 1970s. Their typewriters and calculators were works of art, and you can often find them today in the collections of major modern art museums. Olivetti tried to get into computers, and even had a good-looking IBM PC clone. The nice design didn't help.
The Mathatron came out a year earlier, in 1963. (http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/math8-48mII.html) Unlike the Programma 101, the Mathatron had trig functions built-in. The Mathatron had enough compute power that they offered a remote-access shared programmable calculator with a phone modem. (http://www.amazon.com/Wright-Mathatron-Computer-Calculator-Memorabilia/dp/B0086U6EFG)
The shared-calculator approach reached its peak with the Control Data Remote Calculator. (http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/a-cdc-11-65.html) This was a scheme to have 2000 calculators share a CDC 6600 mainframe computer, an excellent supercomputer of the 1960s. It was not successful, and surplus units appeared in the movies Soylent Green, Westworld, and Marooned.
None of these were very powerful, but the alternative at the time was slide rules and trig tables.
Movies can be a catalyst for good.
The movie Marooned (1969) depicted a Soviet spacecraft rendezvousing with a stricken American spacecraft to deliver oxygen via an EVA. However, it was unable to dock.
This movie was circulating right around the time of the Apollo 13 mission. The movie was shown to Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, who approached the Soviets about a common docking system. The result was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and the APAS androgynous docking system.
See: http://archive.is/zgGEK
For those interested in a pretty ok movie, Marooned (1969) is about the rescue of astronauts unable to de-orbit after spending months in a space station.