Hey, Petzold liked it too!

Ha, I say...Ha! So, I always liked this movie called Desk Set, an old Tracy-Hepburn film from the 1950s. It had a large computer, and interesting mid-century office protocols. Kris always wondered why I like that movie so much. Anyway Charles Petzold wrote an interesting speech here, and here is part of the section about Desk Set:

I recently re-watched what I believe to be the first Hollywood movie to deal with computers in a major way. This is the movie Desk Set. It’s 1957, and Katherine Hepburn supervises three other women in the research department of the Federal Broadcasting Company. Whenever somebody has a question requiring research, they call up on the phone, and Hepburn and her team get to work on the answer.

Enter Spencer Tracy, a self-described Methods Engineer and the inventor of an “electronic brain” called the Electro-Magnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator or EMERAC—“Emmy” for short.

Well, naturally, everybody in the research department assumes they’re going to be fired, just like what happened in payroll when an “electronic brain” was installed there. Although it’s expressed here as a nervous humor, this plot line reflected a real anxiety at the time. Of course, workers didn’t really think that an entire computer was necessary to do their job. No, people instead joked that they were going to be replaced by a single button....

Anyway, it's a good movie, go watch it!