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Computer Equals Monitor - TV Tropes

Yes! Now the other side will have to spend a whole $100 to replace it!

[to phone]

In real life, far more often than not, a computer monitor only serves as a visual display that can be easily replaced if broken. All the actual important stuff — the motherboard, processor, storage, etc. — is housed in a separate computer tower.

Not so in the world of fiction! In fiction, to destroy the computer, and any data stored on it, you only need to destroy the monitor. Usually by shooting it or giving it a good punch.

The trope originates with early personal computers. Systems such as the Commodore PET, the TRS-80 models III and 4, and the Apple Macintosh really were a case of the monitor also housing all of the vital computing components as well. But while "all-in-one" desktop computers still exist (Apple's iMac series leading its resurgence in the late 2000s) and tablets/smartphones are technically handheld versions of such, anyone that requires a computer capable of doing heavy processing work for prolonged periods of time (be it film editing and rendering, high-fidelity gaming, or just some serious number crunching) is unlikely to choose them over the more commonplace monitor and computer tower setup. And that is in addition to the fact that any of the important stuff you wanted to get rid of by destroying the computer may have already been backed up on an external hard drive or SSD... or USB stick... or some offsite server... or— okay, you get the point.

Part of the reason this trope is so commonplace is that, psychologically, the monitor is the "face" of the computer. This is where one sees everything going on, so, if one doesn't have specific knowledge of how computers work, it's not unreasonable to think it's where everything does go on. Or else, if the screen is the "face", the casing must be the "head" and contain the "brain". This can be Truth in Television for people unfamiliar with computers. See also Cranial Processing Unit, a similar misconception applied to humanoid robots.

Rarer is destruction to the keyboard destroying the entire unit (usually due to a carelessly spilled drink). Unlike the monitor, this is actually a more realistic concern considering that most popular 8-bit home computers housed their processors and keyboards in the same unit, using a normal television for their monitor, and many laptops today have the keyboards on top of the circuitry. However, you are far more likely to see the monitor take the killing blow despite it being far less catastrophic.

Damaging a monitor can be justified as making the workstation unusable until another monitor can be hooked up at worst, and possibly killing the computer anyways at best.^note CRTs have powerful capacitors that can hold a very high voltage charge for a couple of minutes even after the power is unplugged. A well placed shot with a metal bullet can, possibly, cause the CRT to discharge the voltage into the data lines, killing the computer or at least the video adapter as well in the process. Even unplugging a monitor with the computer still on can on rare occasion be enough to cause severe damage if it's not designed to be hot-pluggable.

Besides, CRTs blow up so spectacularly, which is why computer science students are taught to only let professionals work on them, as opposed to how other computer components (generally those connected directly to the motherboard) can be worked on more easily. One wonders how long this trope will continue as they become obsolete.

Compare Computer Equals Tapedrive and Destruction Equals Off-Switch. See also Screens Are Cameras and Shoot the Television.

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 

• A Swedish ad for a painkiller shows a man working on his computer when it suddenly shuts down (with the sound of the hard drive and fans spinning down audibly), and then cuts to his kid holding the monitor cable. Nowhere is it implied that the boy had removed any other cables, and it is never mentioned why the entire computer shut down by removing the cable.)

    Anime & Manga 

• Ruki of Comic Girls had this mentality prior to Kaoruko teaching her otherwise. Exaggerated further when she had thought the "strange box" that the monitor came with was a chair.
• Digimon Adventure:
  • The movie "Our War Game" uses this trope in an "accidental" sort of use. Taichi, in a frustrated manner, bangs on the side of the monitor he's using to observe the fight between the Digidestined's Digimon and Diablomon. The computer crashes. Hell, he didn't hit it very hard at all. Taichi's reaction is priceless.
  • A semi aversion as Koushirou's first reaction is to reboot the computer instead of messing around with the monitor.
• At the start of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, as protagonist Satoru is dying, he begs his co-worker Tamura to destroy his hard drive before his family can see its contents. Tamura complies by throwing the tower and monitor into a bathtub full of water.

    Comic Books 

• An older Animal Man comic book had this as a plot point. The Big Bad tries to dispose of the friendly A.I. by blasting the monitor. Failure occurs.
• Averted in a Post-War Games issue of Nightwing, Dick Grayson is working undercover for the mob. He beats up a witness, but leaves when he sees an associate pull out a gun. A jump cut later, its revealed that the mobster didn't shoot the guy, instead he shot the man's computer monitor. Nightwing mentions how that wouldn't work, and says he'll return later to destroy the man's CPU.
• In Spawn, computer monitors are shot to stop downloads.
• Superman/Batman: Variant in issue #46. Two characters are playing a video game, when one declares that the game sucks and destroys the TV that the game console (clearly visible as a separate unit) is plugged into. The other character reacts as if he'd destroyed the game console itself.

    Comic Strips 

• A Finnish newspaper strip had the mid-level boss Murikka first smash the computer screen in frustration, but after becoming more computer savvy, he then takes his anger out on the processor, and later on apparently sets out to go punch Bill Gates himself.

    Fan Works 

• The sequel to Harry Potter and the Natural 20 features an Obliviation raid on a police station to erase the memories of Milo's use of magic. They burst in, Obliviation charms flying, just after the WPC finishes saving her report to a floppy on a brand-new Windows 3.1 PC. Wizards have a shaky grasp of normal technology, and when they come across it, one identifies it as an "eclectic" [sic] typewriter. The other wizard with him smashes the monitor, because you can't be too careful. This issue comes back to haunt them.
• Fallout: Equestria: Littlepip finds a computer in a ransacked home with the monitor smashed in. She notes that someone clearly thought this would destroy the computer, but it did nothing. She hacks in and downloads the files without trouble. That being said, it's been two hundred years since the home was ransacked, and while the computer has incredible Ragnarök-Proofing, the monitor being broken left some sensitive parts more open to the elements, so there was some damage. Littlepip was only able to recover a few files.

    Films — Animation 

• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse jokes with this. When Peter and Miles sneak into a scientist's office to steal some files from their computer, the desktop screen is so horribly cluttered and disorganized that Miles can't tell which files are the ones they need. So he just steals the whole computer, monitor and all. While the two of them are running away from the villain after they're found out, Peter notices Miles struggling with his arms full.

  Peter B.: Let me tell you the good news. (grabs monitor) We don't need the monitor. (flings it offscreen)

    Films — Live-Action 

• Subverted in humorous fashion in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Steve decides he's heard enough of brain-uploaded Arnim Zola's Evil Plan and smashes his primary screen. Dr. Zola simply switches to a second monitor and continues the interrupted spiel.

  Dr. Zola: As I was saying...

• Averted in The Core: When the hacker genius kid sees the feds at the door and assumes he's busted, he immediately pulls out an industrial magnet and rubs it across all of his desktop boxes and servers, and not the monitors.
• The climax of Equilibrium has the protagonist taking out the computerized control-and-surveillance systems of his dystopian city by walking down a long hallway, blasting the monitors that line it. Of course, that might have just been catharsis, as the process also chased away the people watching the monitors. The holograms around the city stopped functioning after Preston shot the monitors, so the computers may be built behind the monitors.
• Averted in Fireproof when the main character, struggling with his pornography addiction, takes the monitor out in the yard and smashes it with a baseball bat. A moment later, he smashes the CPU tower as well.
• Near the climax of GoldenEye, Boris is seen shaking around the CRT monitor of the computer he's at while yelling "Speak to me!", as the titular satellite continues to its doom via burning up over the Atlantic since the instructions to change course he submitted cannot be sent due to the radio transmitter being jammed by Bond. On one hand as a skilled computer hacker he should know better; on the other hand he is very frazzled by this point and for all of his expertise in programming he's certainly not professional in his mannerisms, like putting a single word as his password and the hint as a somewhat sexist riddle ("They're right in front of you, and open very large doors." Knockers.)
• A distinct aversion of this trope is a major plot point in I, Robot. When the heroes need to destroy the evil supercomputer VIKI, the hero suggest shooting her computer brain with his gun. The smart heroine informs him that VIKI is fully backed up throughout the building. What they need are special computer-destroying nanites that will not only destroy the main core but also go on to dismantle the backup systems.
• Subverted in The League Of Gentlemens Apocalypse. The characters are trying to steal a script on one of the writer's hard-drive. Not having a computer of their own to transfer the script to, they have to take the computer in a very limited time and so only take the essential parts; tower, keyboard, mouse... "Leave the monitor, we don't need that!" "How are we going to read it then, genius! Braille?"
• Left Behind The Movie falls to this trope in a particularly spectacular fashion — the conspiracy-preserving assassin shoots out the monitor and not the guy sitting in front of it.
• In The Negotiator: A dirty cop shoots out the monitor of a computer after being told it contains evidence of his crimes. However the evidence didn't actually exist, it was just a ruse to fool him into a confession.
• At the climax of Revelation, the heroes begin uploading a virus onto the villains' computer to prevent the Day of Wonders (a very bad thing) from occurring, only to be caught in the act and herded away while the local bad-guy technician gets to work stopping it. When he fails at this, he unplugs the computer, and when that fails... he desperately begins shooting the monitor. Since the whole scene is implied to be divine intervention at work, he wouldn't have had much luck either way, but he really should have known better.
• In the French action movie Taxi 3, Bai Ling hacks into a police desktop PC by sticking a suction cup on the monitor. Apparently that magically sucks up the contents of the hard drive...
• In Terminator Salvation, Sky Net speaks to Marcus through visual representation on a screen. Upon deciding to break his programming and rescue John Connor, Marcus smashes the screen to terminate the message.
• In Disney movie Up, Up and Away (2000), Adam uses his electrical powers on a bank's computer monitor to bring back a previously running program.
• Zoolander: Derek and Hansel are told incriminating files are in a computer, and so try to expose them by breaking the monitor open in front of a crowd. The computer in question is an iMac, which has a built-in monitor. Even if the monitor was separate, they would probably have managed to destroy the rest of the computer anyway.

    Literature 

• Subverted in The Jennifer Morgue: the protagonist uses some dark magic juju (which is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced mathematics) to hack into his captors' computer network, by way of what appears to be an insufficiently locked-down monitor in the room in which he is confined. However, it's actually a Windows Media Center PC built into the flat-screen TV.
• Averted by Dean Koontz in Midnight. A kid is portrayed as a computer geek. When he has a chance to merge with his computer, he takes off the casing of the tower, and merges with both the tower and the monitor in horrifying fashion.
• Exploited in The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma. Mr. Curtain's Ten Men destroy a bunch of expensive monitors in order to convince government agents that they have destroyed the Whisperer, which was captured from their employer by Mr. Benedict. The actual computers are buried deep underground, but because the government agents don't actually know how the Whisperer works, it's enough to convince them.
• Averted and lampshaded in Zodiac (1988). The baddies trash a computer by busting both the monitor and the processor... which tips off the protagonist that they aren't the dumb thugs he'd assumed, else they'd be content with just breaking the former.

    Live-Action TV 

• In Alias, nearly any time Sydney Bristow (or any other character) uses a device to hack, disable, or clone a computer, the device is placed on the computer's monitor.
• Buffyverse:
  • A scene in "I Robot, You Jane" has Willow becoming annoyed with "Malcolm" (a.k.a. the demon Moloch) and appearing to turn off the computer just by punching the monitor's off button.
  • In "Passion", Angelus destroys Jenny Calendar's computer by throwing her monitor off of the desk, whereby it lands on the floor and explodes pleasingly. Justified as he's over two hundred years old, and doesn't really understand computers. Also, he only destroyed her current data, it was actually saved onto a floppy disk found later.
  • In "Disharmony", Harmony shorts out a computer by spilling coffee on the keyboard. In the Buffy universe, maybe trying to destroy a computer by breaking the monitor isn't so stupid after all.
• Battlestar Galactica. Averted when Baltar has been framed by the Cylons with fake footage showing him committing sabotage just before the Cylon attack on the Colonies. Baltar destroys the hard drive that's enhancing the image, only to whimper helplessly as he sees his face still staring out at him from the monitor, as he's destroyed the wrong computer. His actions only make him look more guilty than ever. For bonus points, the moment he is caught he is about to swing a chair at the monitor.
• This was averted a little too far, and in the opposite direction in an episode of CSI. At a crime scene, they discovered that the suspect's/victim's PC wasn't booting. The cause? The suspect hid their pistol in the case. While computer components themselves are very vulnerable to liquid or even small amounts of static electricity, placing an object inside the computer case probably wouldn't even affect the operation of the computer, let alone preventing it from booting, unless it was placed in such a way as to crush or bend a component, or damage a connection. The average tower has plenty of space for a small to medium-sized handgun.
• Doctor Who: In the new series, in most episodes involving computers, the Doctor controls one by using the sonic screwdriver on the monitor. The classic series preferred Computer Equals Tapedrive. May be semi-justified with the sonic screwdriver, as if you look at the keyboards of some of the computers used, you can recognize them as Macs, with the monitors built in to the computer.
  • Arguably in "The Leisure Hive": the misuse of a tachyonics machine in the climax is averted by the Doctor throwing a ceremonial helmet at its large round display screen.
  • "Dalek": The Dalek "absorbs the entire Internet" through a (broken) monitor.
  • "Smith and Jones": When the computer's database is erased, the Doctor looks for a backup by checking the back of the monitor.
  • In "The Doctor Falls", the screwdriver visibly sucks digital stuff off a laptop's monitor, copying all of the laptop's software in the process. Perhaps the monitor was the most accessible interface offering the highest potential bandwidth.
• In a Colin Hunt sketch on The Fast Show, a deliveryman shows up and says "I've got your new computer". It's just a monitor.
• In the utterly appalling Killer Net, written by Lynda La Plante, the "hero" decides to destroy his computer because... the plot says so, basically, although it's implied that the software is some kind of threat, somehow — look, it's a The Internet Is Evil story, don't expect it to make sense. He does this by hauling the monitor and only the monitor up to the top of a building and throwing it off.
• During season 2 of Lost, a lot of the action for the season takes place in a location known as the Hatch. Within the Hatch is a computer that has to have numbers entered on it every 108 minutes or "the world would end." Early in the season, someone shoots the computer monitor, and Desmond, who's been running it for years, freaks out and runs away, leaving Sayid to repair it before the timer runs down. Later on, the computer is totally destroyed by smashing the monitor on the floor. Only the smashing can be justified, as the actual CPU is attached to the bottom of the monitor, and is smashed to the ground with it.
• The Librarians (2014): Subverted when Dorian Gray used digital art to create a picture of himself made out of small pictures of other people so that they would absorb the consequences of his hedonism. The heroes grabbed the picture and smashed it. Dorian just casually told them that all they did was destroy a tablet, the picture was in the cloud.
• NCIS:
  • Justified in an episode, wheez computer-averse Gibbs tries to fix the e-mail client on his computer by whacking the monitor with a baseball bat he apparently kept under the desk for just this purpose. Gibbs is the type to believe this, and his attempt doesn't accomplish anything. However, played straight later in the same episode when Gibbs is faced with a mainframe that needs to be shut down, which he does by shooting it up; the bullet that apparently serves as the killshot goes through (one of!) the monitors. (If you're feeling generous, you could say that it was an all-in-one system that was part of a CnC cluster, and they just used the term "mainframe" because it would make more sense to the audience. If you're feeling generous.^note On the other hand, it's very likely the NCIS writers are intentionally trolling their techie fans on a regular basis anyway...)
  • In another episode, McGee and Abby are racing to keep ahead of a hacker who is trying to gain external access to their network. Gibbs "solves" the problem by unplugging the local workstation.
• In the Nikita episode "Covenants", when Michael leaves Nikita's loft he shoots her computer monitor with his shotgun. This might be justified in that he was more interested in proving a point than actually destroying her computer.
• Primeval has the variant where a character knocks out a computer by pouring water on the keyboard.
• In Scrubs, when Dr. Cox decides to destroy an old computer in order to force Kelso to buy a new one. However, all he throws out the window is the monitor. The tower is never seen.
• In an episode of Stargate SG-1, a Replicator accesses a computer by literally sticking its hand into the monitor through the glass. Without damaging it. According to the Replicator, it was accessing the computer "directly". While this certainly is possible from a technical standpoint, it's rather inefficient and probably has more to do with Rule of Cool than logic.
• In Star Trek: Voyager:
  • Data from 20th century computers are downloaded by pointing the tricorder at the monitor. They are effectively taking screenshots!
  • Voyager has a futuristic version of this trope with holograms, particularly the Doctor. Logically, a hologram should just be a user interface projection run by the computer, with the actual program stored in whatever relevant computer core is running the projection. However, the series consistently treats any threat to the projection as if it's a threat to the program. An episode with a psychotic maintenance hologram had the hologram be defeated by jabbing it with an exposed power cable. Turning off the computer failed to stop the hologram (it rebooted). This might be justified if the power running through the cable destabilized the forcefields that held the hologram together, in which case the computer might think it was still projecting the hologram at a particular spot, while the hologram was failing to materialize.
• Wonder Woman: IRAC is frequently used by both Diana Prince and Steve Trevor by standing in front of a combination keyboard and monitor in a specialized sealed room built specifically to focus all attention on the monitor. That the monitor itself was an homage to Lite Brite was simply icing on the cake.

    Radio 

• In the '80s BBC Radio Drama Earthsearch, Fagor is rampaging through a Mile-Long Ship while the Angels (the computers who run the spaceship) try to talk the Killer Robot into stopping. Fagor promptly destroys the comm unit, whereupon the Angels contact it on another, pointing out it's simply destroyed one out of a million comm units spread throughout the spaceship. So Fagor announces that it will destroy them all one-by-one!

    Theme Parks 

• Star Trek: The Experience: The Borg drones in "Borg Invasion 4D" infect the computers on the Starfleet station by touching a viewscreen. This is followed with sickly green digital balls quickly covering up the display.

    Video Games 

• In Tomb Raider II, Lara Croft destroys the important data belonging to the Evil Scientist by shooting about eight LCD monitors. Spectacular and expensive but kinda pointless.
• Splinter Cell:
  • In the first game, when bad guys are removing all the evidence from the computers in the Kalinatek mission, one of the mooks shoots a monitor and is convinced that the job is done. Another one scolds him, telling him that people can still retrieve data from it in this state and he also needs to wipe the hard drives and collect USB sticks.
  • Averted in Chaos Theory, where in order to remote-hack any computer, Sam must aim his EEV at the actual hard drive instead of the usually more visible monitors. Averted even further in that computers with the monitors turned off or even destroyed can still be remotely hacked.
• In the first Max Payne game, Max travels to Aesir Corporation and decides to destroy a computer by shooting the monitor several times. Possibly justified, as the accompanying dialogue is rather ambiguous about whether he actually cares if the data contained within is destroyed or if he just shot it for the sake of catharsis.
  • Averted in an easily-missed way earlier on, while Max is forcing his way into a steelworks owned by the Big Bad, which is doubling as a narcotics lab. At one point you have to release an employee who'd been shoved in a holding cell for some reason so he could unlock a door for you. The monitor of the computer terminal into which your new friend had to enter the access code would break if it took a stray bullet when you disposed of the mooks at the security station, but the NPC still manages to open the door, with an extra line of dialogue handwaving his ability to operate the machine blind.
• In Grand Theft Auto IV, the Albanians throw Roman's computer monitor on the ground, and he complains that they "killed" his computer. Of course, Roman is the kind of person who fits into that list from the top of the page.
• The mascot of the Hectic Hackers team in Backyard Basketball is supposed to represent a computer. It is just a monitor (WITH HANDS!) and a keyboard.
• First played straight, then subverted in Phantasy Star Online. The first form of Vol Opt can be damaged by attacking the tasers that pop out of the floor, or the monitors on the walls displaying the boss's face. After taking enough damage, the remaining monitors explode and Vol Opt's "real" body descends into the room to continue the battle.
• In the game Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, in a mission in Kuala Lumpur, you have to shoot a screen in order to complete one of the mission's objectives. Justified somewhat as there is no CPU visible.
• Chrono Trigger's battle against Mother Brain gives you a few targets: the displays (monitors) behind her, which emit some kind of protective field through their screen, and the holographic image that represents her. One wonders how they do any real damage.
• In GoldenEye (1997), destroying a critical monitor during the "Protect Natalya" mission in the Janus base will cause you to fail the mission. Justified in that you don't have time to go around fixing computers. However, you can destroy everything except that monitor without consequence, and it's in fact recommended due to everything being Made of Explodium and blocking your line of fire against the mooks trying to kill you and Natalya.
• In Inscryption near the end this is subverted, when it's revealed ripping off P03's monitor head didn't stop his file uploading.
• The NES version of Metal Gear has you destroying a supercomputer before fighting the Final Boss. Said supercomputer is really massive screen that requires sixteen explosives to destroy.

    Visual Novels 

• Ace Attorney Investigations features an aversion with a cell phone. The cell phone in question has a broken LCD display, but otherwise functions well enough to ring when called. It also has a camera, and the phone's memory contains a photograph critical to the case. Franziska accesses the photograph by synchronizing the phone with her own cell phone, which is a similar model.
• Discussed in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. Lotus and Junpei have a conversation about how a caveman would think that a monitor was the whole computer; this ties into the game's theme of passing information between two seemingly unconnected things. The setup that sparked this discussion, meanwhile, was a monitor that wasn't plugged into anything but a power outlet, but could run computer functions just fine, which initially confused Junpei until Lotus explained that it's most likely wirelessly connected to a nearby computer. She then accuses Junpei of being the aforementioned caveman for not having heard of such commonplace technology before (the sequel retroactively establishes the game as taking place in 2027, so Junpei really has no excuse).
• Your Turn to Die: The Monitor Room has nine monitors that house A.I.s of the candidates. The main computer and its controls are in the middle of the room, but each AI is stored directly on a monitor such that it effectively dies if the monitor breaks.

    Web Animation 

• Homestar Runner:
  • Strong Bad's first two computers contained nothing but a monitor and a keyboard, with their internals apparently inside the monitors (the third one was a laptop, and the fourth one, the Compé, was a flat-screen). The computers they are very, very loosely based on, the Tandy 1000 and the Compaq Deskpro 386, both have a separate computer and monitor.
  • In the Strong Bad Email "redesign", Strong Bad assumes the Cheat won't be able to print out the logo design he just made because "someone sliced off the back half of your monitor" (it was the first flat panel Strong Bad had ever seen). Even given Strong Bad's lack of experience with new technology, this makes no sense, especially since The Paper is perfectly capable of being printed on the Lappy.
  • How does Bubs fix the virus on SB's computer when it screws up the entire site in "virus"? Shoot the Compy in the monitor with a shotgun that had been temporarily turned into Homestar's leg! Also note that after that, when Strong Bad is having a Heroic BSoD in front of the now-dead Compy, the computer appears to have gears inside. It also appears to be larger on the inside...

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 

    Web Videos 

• Obnox OS: Mel throws his monitor out of his office while trying to uninstall Obnox.
• Teens React to Windows 95 have the "test subjects" falling to this trope when asked to turn on an old school desktop PC.

    Western Animation 

• Played in an Imagine Spot in the Arthur episode "Sue Ellen Moves In". Sue Ellen pours water on a professor's keyboard which shorts out the entire computer system before making her escape, just after stealing a vital computer disc.
• Subverted in the Batman Beyond episode "Lost Soul"; Terry tosses a batarang into a giant display screen... which does absolutely nothing to impede the Brain Upload he's trying to stop. Further subverted in that his reaction implies he was trying to hit something actually important and missed because he's not used to fighting without his suit.
• The supercomputer in Code Lyoko, while known to fall under half the tropes in the entire Magical Computer database, very notably averts this trope. The parts of the computer most often seen are the three-screen monitor and holographic map in the center of the top floor of the lab, and then there's the three scanners in the room below. The actual supercomputer itself, however, is a giant cylindrical machine another floor below, which wasn't seen until near the end of the first season. Doing any damage to the equipment above won't damage Lyoko, since the actual hard drives are on the bottom floor.
• In Iron Man: Armored Adventures, Tony needs to stop Fixer (who has been turned into a sentient computer program) from killing a rival, so he shoots him... in the holographic representation of Fixer's head instead of the computer projecting it. Naturally, this works.
• Regular Show does the same thing when Mordecai and Rigby pour coffee on the keyboard of Benson's surveillance system in the episode "Peeps".
• In Rick and Morty, when Jerry creates a dating app that causes the users to immediately seek out whomever they'll been paired with, Morty bashes the monitors Jerry and Glootie were using to remove the app, only for Glootie to point out that he's accomplished nothing.

    Real Life 

• Technically true in some "smart" terminals, although it obviously won't affect the mainframe (which may be miles away).
  • The DEC VT-103 was basically a PDP-11 crammed into a VT-100 chassis, shooting the monitor would put the terminal out of commission. (But if the processor boards aren't damaged you could save part of the computer.) The DEC VT-78 and DECmate systems are basically a microchip based PDP-8 stuck into a terminal for word processing. Finally the DEC GT-40 is another PDP-11 crammed into a terminal.
  • The Datapoint 2200 was an early "intelligent terminal" that was essentially a minicomputer system combining an alphanumeric CRT display, Teletype-style keyboard and cassette tape decks with a 8-bit CPU controlling all three. The Intel 8008, the first commercial 8-bit microprocessor, was a more general-purpose reimplementation of its CPU architecture.
  • Also, shooting a terminal puts a minicomputer out of action until another system console can be found. (Unless you like flicking switches and can mystically read machine code.)
• Also technically true for so-called all-in-one systems (apparently, the keyboard and mouse doesn't count as part of the system). There's too many past and modern day examples to list. Apple lives by the trope (by designing the original "beige toaster" Macintosh as such thus taking the design mainstream, and still keeps it coming with the iMac series of computers), and many PC manufacturers are getting on the bandwagon (especially with the advent of LCD displays and touchscreen all-in-ones). Computer Equals Keyboard variants became rare after the 1980s, but can still be found being made for a niche market.
  • The IBM NetVista X40 actually had the entire motherboard and HDD in a box on the back of the monitor, making it the computer most vulnerable to this Trope. One reasonably well placed bullet from the front could get the screen, motherboard and HDD.
  • The IPC MyGenie, a consumer desktop that was on the market in the late 1990s, was a whole desktop with several other kinds of multimedia hardware, including a FM TV-and-Radio tuner; the whole PC fitted into a tall monitor setup.
  • Speaking of boxes on the back of monitors, some very small desktop PCs (Micro-ATX and smaller) are commonly attached to the backs of normal flat panel monitors using special brackets that fit VESA mount points.
  • All-in-one desktop systems with touchscreens have closed the circle: they became giant tablets.
• In any collection of stupid customer anecdotes, there will always, always, be at least one story from an electronics store employee about someone who came in looking for a new computer, pointing at a monitor and vast array of peripherals and saying "I need that and that and that", then pointing at the tower and saying they won't be needing it because it's too expensive for a peripheral. Sometimes the entire collection is variations on that one story. Such stories tend to date from the mid-late 1990s, when the dot-com boom meant that a lot of people who were unfamiliar with computers were buying PCs for the first time and confusing monitors with TVs.
  • Or at least a user is told to push the reset button.

    User: There is no reset button.
    Tech: Then turn it off, wait 10 seconds, and turn it back on. That'll work, too.
    User: [push ...10 seconds later... push]
    User: No, it's the same as before. [after turning the screen off and on]

  • Or a user decided they didn't need the "space heater" (tower case), turned it off, "and now the computer is broken".
  • Or a user that brings their monitor into the repair shop for an issue with the computer.
  • On a slightly higher level are users that are aware that the tower is the important part of the PC, and where the disk drive is, but still think the desktop lives in the monitor and they have to somehow transfer their files if they replace the monitor.
  • There's one story where thieves broke into a computer lab and stole the monitors and keyboards... but not the tower cases. Although that one might have been out of familiarity with Commodore 64, which had the computer and keyboard in the same unit.
  • There's one story where a marketing company's department manager wanted the "ugly boxes" removed and hired "professionals" to do it when tech support tried to tell her that they were the actual computers, resulting in a data breach because the "professionals" she hired turned out to be thieves.
• The idea behind most of the anecdotes on this list.
• Amstrad were another company that made computers with the processing hardware built-in, instead of in a separate tower. In most models, the hardware was contained in the back of the keyboard, even with the floppy disk drive jutting out of the side. However, shooting out the monitor would still put the system out of commission temporarily, as the monitor plugged into the mains and converted the AC into DC before passing it through to the keyboard unit.
• The Commodore 64, the Atari 400/800, the Atari ST, and the Amiga 500 were home computers with built-in keyboards. Later (2008?), some "new C-64" was offered to retro-gamers, where the computer was in the chassis of a joystick.
  • There's also a rather expensive modern replica of the Amiga 500 knocking around, running the latest version of AmigaOS. (Yes, they still exist.)
  • A modern remake of the Commodore 64 has been announced by Retro Games Ltd., the folks who brought us the C64 Mini. True to its original’s form, the machine’s brains will be housed inside its keyboard. They later brought forth an Amiga version.
  • The Raspberry Pi 400 is another modern take on this style, housing a custom-made Raspberry Pi inside a compact keyboard case as a deliberate throwback to the C64 and ZX Spectrum.
• A gang of thieves once stole all the mice, keyboards, and monitors from an office in the Pentagon. If you believe their testimony though, they intentionally didn't go for the computers themselves because they were hoping the missing equipment would be chalked up to bureaucratic error and nobody would look into it very closely as long and no data was compromised. Or they might have just been stupid spies advised to say that by their lawyer as stealing office supplies caries a much less severe sentence than stealing state secrets.
• A subversion with convertible tablets. When in laptop mode, even a genre savvy person who doesn't know the model of the laptop may think all the guts are in the keyboard dock, where they would be in a normal laptop. However, the guts are entirely in the "monitor", since you can take it out and use it like a tablet.
  • Although there are now convertibles that have additional computational power in the keyboard. For example, the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 contains the CPU in the monitor portion, but an additional discrete GPU in the keyboard.
• Van Eck Phreaking is almost a straight example. CRT monitors — and to a lesser extent modern flatscreens — emit tiny amounts of electromagnetic radiation that change measurably depending on what's on the screen. You probably couldn't read an entire document that way unless the monitor was very old and poorly-shielded, but the technique has been tested against electronic voting machines and proven capable of compromising the secrecy of the ballot.
• Streaming PCs are a type of micro computer meant to attach to the back of a television, as a more versatile alternative to something like a Roku or Amazon fire stick. They essentially turn your monitor into a pc.

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