I Had Hoped "Chicago Code"

would be an awesome fictionalization of the assembler, COBOL, JCL, CICS, IMS big-iron computer programming subculture that existed briefly in Chicago at the tail-end of the age of 80-character records and mass-storage devices that took up whole floors and were protected by industrial-strength air conditioners and Halon gas blowers.

A dramedy about Friday red-eyes to Vegas, nooners in sticky South Loop hotels, pitching quarters into milk bottles for drinks at 4 a.m. taverns, hustling pool on the shitty little table at the Greek joint, barhopping and bedhopping from sundown until eye-frying sunrise, computer "games" made of formulas, exclamation points and asterisks, pinballing though alleys packed four in a rebuilt Porche, strolling the short-lived disaster that was the State Street pedestrian plaza and dreaming of some day "coding from the beach"...in an age when you could spend hours waiting for the six-inch-thick sheaf of green-bar paper vomited out by a core-dump to wend its way up from the print room so you could crawl your way through a heap of hexadecimal to find which LRECL was busted, or which record and line of code collided because a data entry clerk typed zero instead of "O".

But instead "Chicago Code" is just another bad, unnecessary cop show.

Stoopid Hollywood.