Matrix Digital Rain on IBM PC 5150 and 5151

Have you ever wondered what the Digital Rain effect from the Matrix would look like running on an old IBM 5150 with a 5151 monitor, with its high persistence phosphor?
No?
Well I did, and here's the result.

[IainShepherd]

Whoa that’s so cool. Thanks
Nice to see the 5151. You can see why it beat CGA for plain text work. So vivid and crisp - as long as you never scroll. :)

[StripeyType]

For reasons unclear to me, my high school still had these for our computer programming classes. So I learned C and Pascal on 5150s with 5151 displays. I do sort of miss it. Thanks so much for bringing it back.
You've also reminded me that when I first saw The Matrix in 1999, my second reaction to that effect (after, "Wow!") was, "Wait, it's scrolling upside-down!"

[VictorNamba]

Your experiment show me how the designer from the movie catched or study a lot to simulate the trails from a phosphor monitor. It is a masterpiece! Thanks to share.

[AndersBergh]

This totally did my day! Thanks for sharing. I did mimic this effect in 3dsmax back in 2000, with the 3d effect of zooming in and going though the effect.. But this is on another level

[zetneteork]

Absolutely brilliant. I did not expect to be this piece of code would be written in assembler. Cool

[giltomas]

Spectacular! This is absolutely awesome. This looks better than the movie, I don't know why you didn't worked on matrix 4. The new matrix effect is horrible. Thanks for sharing this

[Nomadnetic]

That is absolutely beautiful. Excellent work.

[AbulaSyllabus]

Yup, that's definitely the best and right way to do it. Love it! <3

[somemuffinsu]

This is SUPER COOL! Can you post a video of it running for an hour so I could make it into the screensaver or background? The shot you setup was PERFECT!

[Alex-jwun]

Really cool, I can watch it the whole night :D Thank you!

[Linus]

I had the same setup except my monitor had a choice of green or amber. Fond memories. Thank you for sharing.

[PC]

Well, actually, in my opinion, this is not the digital rain effect, but digital rain itself. All of those screensavers etc. give you just fake effect of fading. Here the fading is real so it's awesome!

[djstatyk]

I love people like you <3 You make us happy (: People like myself just love the simpler things. Thank you! ^.^

[YvanJanssens]

I use a 5291 terminal for my AS/400s as a console, which uses the same CRT as a 5151 display, and when using it with period appropriate software it wasn't a mess. Don't forget, software at the time was designed to run on these machines, and thus the UX matched it's output device's limitations. When I use it on CHONKY with OfficeVision/400 (or another screen-based tool that has a 'template' in which you type stuff over), it works remarkably well, because you only get the ghosting when you go to the next screen. Unix-like UX'es that are line mode would be quite awful tho.

[alomartiniano]

That's awesome!! Just awesome! Thanks for that.

[nexusyang]

THAT is super cooool!!!!
Long live assembly! :)

[phizc]

Cool! Now the question is - did you emulate the Matrix rain on a 40 year old PC, or did the Matrix emulate a 40 year old PC. Red or blue?

[abdulwahabal-qatami]

I don't see the effect, all I see is people crossing a busy street.

[smmackey]

My sisters had this computer given to them by their school 😅

[AlioshaPugachev]

Thank you that was epic! Do you think it could be coded in basic? I wonder what it would look like on a passive matrix LCD. The effect should be somewhat similar.