What's the first film with computers that make lots of beeping noises?

[charlesr]

Text appearing on screen character by character? Best make lots of beeping noises!

I'm watching Godzilla (1998 Matthew Brodrick) with my amazing GF. It has copious amounts.

So, the hunt is on! Which film has it first? I googled but didn't see an answer. So try not to Google it. Just report back here when you find something earlier.

[Brad]

Wargames, also Broderick. 1983

[wakka]

2001 ('68) and Westworld ('73) were two early computer techno thrillers. Dunno if these qualify as what you're looking for.

[charlesr]

Did the computers make the lots of unnecessary beeping noises?

[eastyy]

2001 space odyssey ?

[Neon Ignition]

Doesn't qualify but it says a lot that this was the first thing to come to mind

[charlesr]

2001 looks promising. But the noises in that clip seem like warning noises appropriate to the displayed messages.

[Cassius_Smoke]

Alien has lots of beeps and clicks going on.

[Neon Ignition]

Apparently a film called Desk Set from 1957, starring Katherine Hepburn was based around a large beeping computer in its plot. Can't find anything citing it as being the first though so the search continues

[nonny]

Electric Dreams (1984?) also had someone singing over them, it was rather catchy now I think of it ...

[QualityChimp]

It's clearly 1928 and Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus", which also had a woman talking on a mobile phone:


Irrefutable evidence of Chaplin using a computer:

->Open Spoiler<-

[QualityChimp]

Apparently a film called Desk Set from 1957, starring Katherine Hepburn was based around a large beeping computer in its plot. Can't find anything citing it as being the first though so the search continues

I was going to suggest Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, as the film was 1961 and the series followed and started in B&W.

Turns out, the big bleeping computer in the background is the same computer used in Desk Set!
Wiki: The computer referred to as EMERAC (in Desk Set) is a homoiophone metonym for ENIAC ("Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer"), which was developed in the 1940s and was the first electronic general-purpose computer. Parts of the EMERAC computer, particularly the massive display of moving square lights, would later be seen in various 20th Century Fox science fiction productions, including both the motion picture (1961) and TV (1964-68) versions of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

[QualityChimp]

OK, so I think I have your answer, Chaz.

Following the thread of discussion about EMERAC, lead me to find it's been used in other media.

You name the Fox sci-fi movie, EMERAC was there, patterned lights a-flashing:

https://pantagraph.com/blogs/craft-from-emerac-with-love-and-ubiquity/article_a8d3cb88-e25f-50a8-88b2-110438e1ddfd.html

""Kronos" (1957), which appears to be the first film to re-use it; "The Fly" (1958); "Return of the Fly" (1959); the original movie version of "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" (1961); "Fantastic Voyage" (1966); virtually every '60s Irwin Allen-produced TV series extant, especially "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," where it was on view every week somewhere behind Richard Basehart's and David Hedison's furrowed brows, but also in "Lost in Space," "Time Tunnel," etc."

However, in the same article, it talk about the film "Gog":
In terms of computers-in-movies history, EMERAC came along after the first "brain" to land a starring role in Hollywood, courtesy 1954's "Gog," in which an easily duped computer named NOVAC (Nuclear Operative Variable Automatic Computer) is taken over by sinister (i.e., Red) forces at a top secret underground government research lab in the New Mexico desert.



So, there are several answers to your several questions!
I think the first on-screen computer was NOVAC in "Gog".
I think audiences were conditioned to the idea of computers in sci-fi like This Island Earth and Forbidden Planet.




Then, I think EMERAC in Desk Set is probably the first real computer onscreen and it's appearances in so many shows and films ingrained itself into movie shorthand for computers and the bleepy bloopy computers are descendants of that.

As for the final part with text appearing on a monitor, I'm not sure.

It does make me laugh how we still have movie shorthand for a lot of things.
I was watching Reacher (2022) and at one point, he looks through some binoculars and it's unwritten movie law that if you look through binoculars, you HAVE to show the binocular shape to tell the audience this is what the person is seeing through them:

[charlesr]

Good work people!

That Top Secret clip