I've seen "The Saint" about twelve times. The first time I thought it was good, and was generally impressed with Val Kilmer's talent for playing so many different characters in the same movie. After having used a Macintosh for about a year, I saw the movie again, and made a discovery:

"Hey, that looks like mine!"

Indeed, in the movie, Simon Templar uses a Macintosh PowerBook 5300ce. I have a PowerBook 190. Inside, they are quite different, but they have the same casing. Thus, in fast moving action scenes they tend to look a lot alike. The 5300 series were the first PowerPC laptops. The 5300ce model sold for almost $7,000. It was quite the nifty number in its hay day. To learn more about these models, click here, to go to Apple-History, one of my favorite sites.

Apple worked with Paramount to ensure that The Saint had only the very coolest in Apple technology. By close examinations of freeze frames, I have made a few discoveries:

A wonderful little program called Kaleidoscope is running on the laptop. It allows one to change the appearance of the operating system. The one used in the movie is called "Hitec" and is now contraband in the non-movie world. The story behind this is that when Apple was originally planning the appearance for OS 8 (known as Copland), they planned to have it include four distinctly different interfaces: Drawing Board, Hitec, Scherzo, and Platinum. Somehow, Hitec and Drawing Board were leaked to the public, and Apple pulled the plug. Platinum is still alive and well today as the default appearance of OS 8, and 8.5. (If you're lucky enough to have OS 8.5, you can have sounds too.) Scherzo (a decidedly kid-oriented interface) is included with the Kaleidoscope package.

The Saint uses a Global Village PC Card modem. So do I! (These coincidences are quite groovy) When Simon went online, something called the "Apple Internet Starting Point" popped up. Sadly there is no such thing for the rest of us. When I open up the PC Card from my desktop, I get a launcher-type thing, to which I can add an alias to any program on my computer. Though not the same thing, I can still gain easy access to my browser and email client.

Secret messages are encoded at a "Indonesian Horticultural Society" forum. This is done by using a special encoding program. It looked to me like this was launched by using one of the function keys. This program was used for encoding email messages as well as fax transmissions.

If you wish to learn more about the movie The Saint, go here. Even if you're not looking for anything remotely related to The Saint, just go there. Go on, get out of my hair!