Coincidence between the start spacecraft scene in Prometheus and 60s phreaking

4 points · damiaozi · 19 days ago

Is there any coincidence between the scene in "Alien Prometheus" where the engineer pilot ignites the spacecraft by a piccolo and 1960s phreaking(2600 Hz whistles)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NegOHzcBlHQ (1:09)

btw, In the real world, in addition to the early Ma Bell telephone system(in-band signaling), are there any complex systems that are controlled by tones (not human voice)?

4 comments

toast0 · 19 days ago

Any sort of system where you have an band limited audio channel and need signalling is going to end up using tones. DTMF is a lot more robust, but single frequencies work too. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quindar_tones

pmdulaney · 19 days ago

Oooooh... so that's why that hacker magazine is called 2600. I honestly didn't know.

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