Cold War era characterizations of the Communist societies in China and the Soviet Union as subhuman, mechanical and lacking in free will resonated seamlessly with the characterization of computers as unfeeling, technocratic and controlling technologies. Soldiers returning from the Korean War in John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), for example, were reprogrammed (or "brainwashed - the new American word") by their Chinese captors to unquestioningly execute commands that overrode even the deepest of their human emotions or individual desires. The brainwashed soldiers in a platoon led by Frank Sinatra, for example, were hypnotized to deliver robot-like accounts of the heroism of a soldier who has been cultivated as a sleeper agent. The hypnosis used for behavior control in The Manchurian Candidate was entirely nontechnological, however the metaphors for computation are difficult to miss. The sleeper agent Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) who was programmed to assassinate a presidential nominee in order to install a puppet administration in Washington, DC was "conditioned" to begin following commands of his Communist programmers upon being shown a particular playing card.

The card-based interface for controlling the hypnotized Shaw resonates unmistakably with the punch card programming that dominated mainframe computers of this era. When the already affectless Shaw is shown the queen of diamonds in an ordinary deck of playing cards, his hypnotic programming takes over and makes him susceptible to execute a series of pre-scripted commands. As with the inevitable explosion of punch cards that marks the computational demise of cinematic mainframes, Shaw similarly self-destructs and commits suicide when his conscious mind recognizes his actions under hypnosis, which included killing his mother (a Communist agent played by Angela Lansbury) and sacrificing his one true love. In the figure of Raymond Shaw, then, the fundamental tensions between human and machine are thrown into sharp relief, ultimately leading to a spectacular, total system failure. Shaw's malfunction is initiated by the intelligence officer, Sinatra, who deliberately overloads Shaw's programming by showing him an entire deck of cards made up of his trigger card, the queen of diamonds:

Take a good look at 'em, Raymond, look at 'em, and while you're looking, listen. This is me, Marco, talking. 52 red queens and me are telling you... you know what we're telling you? It's over! The links, the beautifully conditioned links are smashed. They're smashed as of now because we say so, because we say they are to be smashed. We're busting up the joint, we're tearing out all the wires. We're busting it up so good all the queen's horses and all the queen's men will never put old Raymond back together again. You don't work any more! That's an order. Anybody invites you to a game of solitaire, you tell 'em sorry, buster, the ball game is over!

Sinatra's use of physical and mechanical metaphors (the busting, smashing or tearing out of wires and links) is characteristic of the early mainframe era when the reprogramming of computers was accomplished through the reconfiguration of hardware rather than the rewriting of software. The response achieved in the person of Raymond Shaw, however, is not bodily destruction, but a mental equivalent of a feedback loop that causes Shaw's internal processor to self-destruct.

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