History Main / MasterComputer

* ''Fanfic/RocketshipVoyager'' is a ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' fanfic written InTheStyleOf a 1950's sci-fi magazine pulp. ''Voyager'' has an entire deck allocated to its computer, and Earth's megacities are run by Electronic Minds that take up an entire block. The conflict with the Maquis (a radical faction of AsteroidMiners) arose when these Electronic Brains decided to surrender the Asteroid Belt to a hostile species on purely logical grounds, regardless of how the Belters might actually feel about it.

* ''Radio/{{Earthsearch}}''. The only vulnerable point of a freewill computer is the central switching room. In Season 2, [[AIIsACrapshoot Angel One and Two]], the freewill computers who control the Challenger, [[HilariousInHindsight distribute their systems throughout the ship to make them less vulnerable to direct attack]], but this is apparently less efficient as they have to return to the central switching room to process the vast intake of knowledge promised by Earthvoice.

* Radio/{{Earthsearch}}''. The only vulnerable point of a freewill computer is the central switching room. In Season 2, [[AIIsACrapshoot Angel One and Two]], the freewill computers who control the Challenger, [[HilariousInHindsight distribute their systems throughout the ship to make them less vulnerable to direct attack]], but this is apparently less efficient as they have to return to the central switching room to process the vast intake of knowledge promised by Earthvoice.

* The AI ''Archaelon'', named after its original ship, is effectively this in ''Webcomic/RankAmateur''. Whilst he can run off a number of independant 'C-Cores', they are all kept in the same place on the HSDSS ''Fox Fire''

* ''VideoGame/SystemShock'' plays with the trope: SHODAN is a classic Master Computer on Citadel Station, and you eventually hunt down her main processors on the station's bridge. Rather than blow up the hardware, though, your character enters cyberspace and directly deletes SHODAN's main program. [[spoiler:''System Shock 2'' reveals that SHODAN had a semi-autonomous sub-program on that pod you ejected from the gardens, from which she's able to rebuild herself given a few years. However, in the sequel, she's not in complete control of the computers in the game due to the machinations of the Many, so her influence is far more limited.]]

* ''Anime/StarTwinklePrettyCure'' has the Mother AI, which runs the alien planet Saman by interfacing with Personal AI that's distributed to each citizen. Surprisingly, Saman's AI ''isn't'' a crapshoot; it's an unfailingly BenevolentAI, albeit one that's easily hacked into by the villains. The main issue is more that Saman is a TerminallyDependentSociety, relying on the AI to think for them rather than thinking for themselves.

* Creator/IsaacAsimov and Creator/RobertSilverberg's ''Literature/TheUglyLittleBoy1991'': Silverberg adds to Dr Asimov's description of the Stasis control centre, [[Lampshadehanging lampshading]] that it looks like a movie set for some ridiculous ScienceFiction film with huge screens, thick black cables, and a large console of instruments.

* "The General" in ''Series/ThePrisoner1967''. [[spoiler:(It self-destructed when asked the question "Why?")]]

* ''Film/AllTheTroublesOfTheWorld'': The {{Montage}} of computer parts during the opening and closing credits is supposed to give the audience a sense of Multivac's scale.
* {{Montage}}: During the [[TitleSequence opening]] and closing credits, the camera shifts between {{pan}}s of different computer parts, such as logic boards, switchboards, [[TechnicolorScience flashy lights]], and [[ComputerEqualsTapedrive tape drives]]. This gives the audience a sense of [[MasterComputer Multivac's scale]].

** ''Literature/AllTheTroublesOfTheWorld'': Multivac has grown larger than a city (it is hidden below Washington, D.C.), and networked with other large computer systems in every city on Earth. In addition to armies of civil servants inputting data, every adult citizen is expected to share their intimate personal feelings with Multivac on a regular basis. [[TerminallyDependentSociety Without Multivac, society would collapse.]]
** ''{{Literature/Franchise}}'': Muller doesn't actually meet with the Multivac, he's taken to a nearby hospital instead to use peripheral devices that communicate with it. So the narration tells us what he's heard of. He's heard that Multivac is half a mile long, and three stories high. That about fifty programmers/engineers are inside it at any one time, day or night. The senior programmer explains that there are too many security precautions to allow Norman to meet Multivac directly.

** "Literature/PointOfView": Multivac is so large that the programmers and support personnel live in the property, and there's enough people that it counts as a small city. For just one computer.

[[folder:Comic Books]]

* ''Film/TheTerminator'' has Kyle Reese saying that John Connor wins the RobotWar by destroying the central Skynet computer, effectively taking it out. In ''Film/Terminator3RiseOfTheMachines'', grown-up John intends to do that to ''prevent'' the war, as Skynet has just taken control of the nuclear arsenal and will launch it. [[spoiler:It turns out to be a subversion, because changes in the timeline (along with the real world technology) mean Skynet's software is now distributed on a global scale.]]
* The WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) computer in the movie ''Film/WarGames''. Not initially (and not designed to be) a Master Computer, but becomes one after the events in the movie's introduction.

* In ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy1'' you had the greatest computer in the universe, designed by the second greatest computer in the universe, "Deep Thought", whose sole purpose was to discover the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything. Unfortunately, Deep Thought didn't know the ''question'', so it had to create the plans for an even bigger computer, one the size of a planet... in fact it ''is'' a planet. True to form, the computer gets blown up. [[spoiler:The computer is Earth.]]
* AM from Harlan Ellison's ''Literature/IHaveNoMouthAndIMustScream'', originally named Allied Mastercomputer, then Adaptive Manipulator, then Aggressive Menace, and finally just AM (as in ''I Think Therefore I Am''). His mainframe was implied to span the entire planet, and he was essentially a god within it -- but AM is [[spoiler:three networked mainframes with thousands of redundant systems]]. In the videogame, AM [[spoiler:is eventually defeated by shutting down all three mainframes, and one human victim taking control of them to restore the planet.]]

* ''Series/DoctorWho'': The Doctor is right below Captain Kirk.
** A particularly good example is WOTAN from "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS3E10TheWarMachines The War Machines]]," which is similar to Skynet from the ''Franchise/{{Terminator}}'' franchise -- but, this being TheSixties, it consists of a single Master Computer based in the Post Office Tower in London.
** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS10E5TheGreenDeath The Green Death]]" features a villainous computer known as "BOSS".
* ''Series/BlakesSeven'' has the Federation's Star One, which somehow manages to be this for an empire that stretches across several dozen solar systems and controls almost ''everything''. This is almost certainly an InvokedTrope on account of the Federation's paranoid megalomaniac tendencies, and when the thing finally gets blown up the consequences are ''not'' pretty for the galaxy.
* "The General" in ''Series/ThePrisoner1967''. (It self-destructed when asked the question "Why?")

* ''Fanfic/Plan7Of9FromOuterSpace''. Contrary to the belief that the needs of the world could be [[HistoricalInJoke handled by only five computers]], the Great Calculator is so powerful it can handle the needs of the entire solar system! [[spoiler:Turns out the Great Calculator is not just number-crunching as the President of Earth is just a digital avatar.]]

** Multivac, from the early short stories, is a benevolent version of this trope. The humans genuinely ''are'' happy that it's in charge of so many aspects of their lives.

** In "The Last Question," [[http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html (readable here)]] the story takes place over an indeterminate length of time, where people ask the same question (how to prevent the heat death of the universe) of Multivac and every one of its descendants. This ends with "Man", the personification of a true, perfect unification of ''every last human being in the universe'', asks the question of the final version of the AC. It still can't answer... [[spoiler:but when heat death does occur, it merges with Man, spends an undefined amount of time processing, and then revitalises the universe by declaring "Let There Be Light".]]

* ''The Cosmic Computer'' in the Creator/HBeamPiper novel of the same name.

* ''Film/TheTerminator'' has Kyle Reese saying that John Connor wins the RobotWar by destroying the central Skynet computer, effectively taking it out. In ''Film/Terminator3RiseOfTheMachines'', grown-up John intends to do that to ''prevent'' said war, as Skynet has just taken control of the nuclear arsenal and will launch it. [[spoiler:It turns out to be a subversion, because changes in the timeline (along with the real world technology) mean Skynet's software is now distributed on a global scale.]]

** In "The Last Question," [[http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html (readable here)]] the story takes place over an indeterminate length of time, where people ask the same question (how to prevent the heat death of the universe) of Multivac and every one of its descendants. This ends with "Man", the personification of a true, perfect unification of ''every last human being in the universe'', asks the question of the final version of the AC. It still can't answer... [[spoiler:but when said heat death does occur, it merges with Man, spends an undefined amount of time processing, and then revitalises the universe by declaring "Let There Be Light".]]

* The Galactic Alliance has one, in ''WesternAnimation/BuzzLightyearOfStarCommand''. Benevolent. Also critical, and full of sensitive information. When it was trashed by a techno-tick, XR plugged himself in as a temporary surrogate, and failed to delete said sensitive info from his memory afterwards, making him a target for Zurg.

* As noted above, this used to be TruthInTelevision until well into the 1990s for most industrial or scientific applications. Even though personal computers[[note]]or microcomputers, as the term "personal Computer" was first coined as an IBM trademark in 1981[[/note]] had been around since the late Seventies, they were limited by their inability to multi-task: Running more than one process at once was the exclusive domain of mainframes up until the mid-80s, and it would take another few iterations of Moore's Law before desktop hardware was capable enough that a majority of businesses could function without needing "computer time" at a central location.
* The vast majority of companies still have no backup plan for when their key server or servers go down. Some have been bankrupted by loss of business caused by system failure that could not be remedied quickly. Perhaps more importantly, some sorts of highly resilient systems which support exotic things like 'hot failover' or 'byzantine fault tolerance' are exceedingly difficult to engineer well, or at all. Google can do it, but few others manage.
** DEC used to show off a highly fault-tolerant system at [=DECWorld=] conventions, where they would have actors go into the "computer room" and do things like flip switches or even open the case and start yanking out circuit boards and the system would continue blithely running the same program (this was accomplished by having at least two of every component; if one failed, the computer would switch over to the spare).
* Nowadays, the unit of failure is more likely to be a datacentre or server room rather than a single all-powerful system. Nonetheless, power or communications failures in such facilities can and have caused widespread havoc due to the sheer number of affected devices and the sudden loss in computing ability.
* Amazon and Telehouse have had notable datacentre failures. Google's internal architecture is significantly more resilient in nature.

* Much numerical research is done in this way, with a small number of machines being operated through the internet by a large number of operators. This means that when one machine fails, several people are unable to get their programs run. This sort of cluster is still resilient to total failure of a single component, however.

* Omnius in the Expanded ''Literature/LegendsOfDune'' Series. In the prequels dealing with the Butlerian Jihad, they're networked with each other, but because they're separated by large stretches of space, the travel time between updating allows opportunity for sabotage, and then destruction of each network. In [[Literature/HuntersSandwormsOfDune the sequels]], there's only one Master Computer that has to be dealt with (admittedly, having someone who's effectively god on your side doesn't hurt either).

* MORGUL, the main antagonist of early ''VideoGame/{{Turrican}}'' games is a three-faced computer. MORGUL stands for '''M'''ultiple '''Org'''anism '''U'''nit '''L'''ink.

Older media dealing with computers were predicated on the idea of the Master Computer. A science fiction {{dystopia}} holding humanity in chains could be liberated by finding the key mainframe and either shutting it down or destroying it. The main character often destroys the key mainframe by asking it a [[LogicBomb paradoxical or philosophical question]] or by reading [[StrawVulcan poetry]] to it, causing it to self-destruct. A major, world-spanning corporation could be brought to its knees by sabotaging its mainframe. Governments could be held hostage by anyone who controlled the single computer and rendered its data inaccessible. Hmm, sounds like the current sitatuon now with any snail town with one master server.

Largely a DiscreditedTrope today due to the growth of [[TheInternet networks and multiply redundant systems]]; and, maybe, due to [[TheGreatPoliticsMessUp the fall of the Soviet Union]], that [[ControlFreak simply loved centralizing everything]]. However, the software industry called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is built around integrating all of a business or university's accounting and management software and automatically generating reports for the executives. So instead of being one physical computer, the Master Computer is now one or more entire data centers. See also ComputerEqualsTapedrive.

* The Viewsonic V1250s tablet computer, supposedly.

** Justified in ''Portal 2'', after TheReveal. [[spoiler:The [=GLaDOS=] project was developed to upload the mind of the CEO of Aperture Science, Cave Johnson, to a computer so he could run the company forever. He died before the project could be completed, forcing his assistant Caroline [[UnwillingRoboticisation to take his place.]]]]

* The original ''[[Series/TheTwilightZone Twilight Zone]]'':
** 4th season episode "The Old Man in the Cave". [[spoiler: there is no old man in the cave, only a Master Computer. Which, ironically, turns out to have been on the survivors' side; when they destroy it and defy its warnings about contaminated canned food, the townsfolk poison themselves en masse.]]
** 4th season episode "The Brain Center at Whipple's". The Boss replaces his entire workforce with a Master Computer to run the factory - cue KarmicTwistEnding. [[spoiler: the boss is replaced by another computer.]]
* An episode of ''Series/TheOuterLimits1995'' had a computer who had the ability to brainwash the citizens of a small town, with the exception of one scientist, who was working against it. Sadly, [[spoiler:[[DownerEnding the codes he thought would shut it down]] [[CruelTwistEnding actually extended the range of its control.]]]]

Older media dealing with computers were predicated on the idea of the Master Computer. A science fiction {{dystopia}} holding humanity in chains could be liberated by finding the key mainframe and either shutting it down or destroying it. The main character often destroys the key mainframe by asking it a [[LogicBomb paradoxical or philosophical question]] or by reading [[StrawVulcan poetry]] to it, causing it to self-destruct. A major, world-spanning corporation could be brought to its knees by sabotaging its mainframe. Governments could be held hostage by anyone who controlled the single computer and rendered its data inaccessible.

* The third ''Series/UltramanCosmos''[='=]s movie, ''Ultraman Cosmos vs. Ultraman Justice: The Final Battle'' featured Delaxion, the cosmic equivalent of such (think ''Franchise/StarTrek''[='=]s {{Energy Being}}s and {{Master Computer}}s combined). She's a computer-like being of absolute order who prophesied that Earth would be a threat to the universe, and had to wipe them out for the sake of keeping the universe in a state of balance by sending Ultraman Justice, robots called Glokers, and a superweapon called Giga Endra to destroy the planet.

See also TheComputerIsYourFriend. An AI Master Computer is [[AIIsACrapshoot a very loaded crapshoot]]; if it's called [[OneBadMother "Mother" or "Mother Brain"]], [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast just get out of there]]. Such computers often have overly dramatic names; that's NamesGivenToComputers.

* One chapter of ''Manga/BlackJack'' involved a high-tech hospital run almost entirely by a computer, Brain U-18. When U-18 starts to malfunction, [[AIIsACrapShoot it rebuffs all attempts to repair it and insists that they call in the title character to "operate"]].
* In ''LightNovel/DirtyPair'', [[HeroesRUs the WWWA]] is run by a "Central Computer", which decides which agents get assigned to a case -- and also infallibly clears the Lovely Angels of blame for [[MikeNelsonDestroyerOfWorlds the latest disaster to occur in their wake]].

* Mother in ''Manga/MotherKeeper'' is this, at least according to Graham, Mother is the central CPU which control the whole of Eden and is protected by the mother keepers.

** In "The Last Question", [[http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html (readable here)]] the story takes place over an indeterminate length of time, where people ask the same question (how to prevent the heat death of the universe) of Multivac and every one of its descendants. This ends with "Man", the personification of a true, perfect unification of ''every last human being in the universe'', asks the question of the final version of the AC. It still can't answer... [[spoiler:but when said heat death does occur, it merges with Man, spends an undefined amount of time processing, and then revitalises the universe by declaring "Let There Be Light".]]

** "Mother", officially Fleet Central, was designed as the conserver of the Fourth Empire. She's hardwired against self-awareness, and is inherited by the Fifth Imperium tens of thousands of years after the Empire's fall. All of the ships of the Empire's Battle Fleet were hardwired to obey her, and she is also ultimately in charge of determining the Emperor's fitness for the throne.

** A particularly good example is WOTAN from "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS3E10TheWarMachines The War Machines]]", which is similar to Skynet from the ''Franchise/{{Terminator}}'' franchise -- but, this being TheSixties, it consists of a single Master Computer based in the Post Office Tower in London.

* "The General" in ''Series/ThePrisoner1967'' (self-destructed when asked the question "Why?")