It goes deeper! A user posted a photo on oddly terrifying of a wall painted with the phrase “What’s a place like this doing to a nice girl like you?” Another user finds that the phrase comes from the book Soul of a New Machine (which appears in the final scene of HACF). The phrase is painted on wall of a room in computer engineer Tom West’s house, where the skunkworks development of a computer is occurring.
Interestingly, another user then says that this is her house which is for sale. That user is Jessamyn West, daughter of Tom, who grew up to do lots of interesting work on the internet in terms of digital librarianship (including the Internet Archive). She confirms it’s her house with some Flickr photographs.
I wondered if she had seen HACF and she is halfway through the first season. She also mentions that the scene where Donna fixes the Speak and Spell comes from her childhood! If so, it’s pretty cool that she ended up doing similar work to Hayley in terms of internet curation!
Link to the thread about Jessamyn & Tom.
Original comment about the quote and Soul of a New Machine https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/xs4dma/basement_wall_of_a_home_for_sale_in_my/iqizh5k/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3