by CADE MATZ
The Man With The Golden Gun is the James Bond movie where Roger Moore flies to the tip of the Malay Peninsula so he can do battle with the little dude from Fantasy Island and a cold-blooded contract killer who has three nipples and a serious solar energy fetish.
When Moore arrives, his three-nippled nemesis takes him on a tour of a massive underground lair where vats of liquid helium convert raw sunlight into a death ray capable of squeezing money from the largest countries on Earth. But the most amazing part of this solar extravaganza is that it’s all run by an ICT 1301.
ICT — short for International Computers and Tabulators — was Britain’s answer to IBM. The 1301 was a business machine built in the early 1960s, when punch cards and drum storage were state of the art. In other words, it wasn’t built for use with vats of liquid helium. “It was built to do pounds, shillings, and pence arithmetic in hardware,” says Roger Holmes, part of a team in Britain working to restore an old ICT 1301 to working order. “It was also a decimal machine, but strictly speaking, it couldn’t do binary calculations.”
Some love The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) for that stunt where the red AMC hatchback jumps over a river and corkscrews to the other side. Others love it for Roger Moore’s hideous mid-’70s wardrobe. But here at Wired, we love it for the ICT 1301.
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