Remember Knight Rider? The quintessential ’80s cop show ran from 1982-1986 and provided David Hasselhoff (as Michael Knight) with a springboard to international fame and eventual Baywatch fortune. He was shot, then he got plastic surgery, then he took on crime. Knight sped around in a custom 1982 Pontiac Trans-Am named “KITT” (Knight Industries Two Thousand) that was powered by a talking computer, voiced by William Daniels. And now you can turn the latest model of the MacBook Pro into a laptop version of KITT.
The feature won’t work on any of the older models, as it involves the Touch Bar. An enterprising retro TV fan by the name of Anthony Da Mota recently uploaded “KnightTouchBar2000” to GitHub for anyone to try out for free. What it does is make the Touch Bar look and function just like that flashing red light on KITT’s face … er, grille.
The light bounces back and forth as if KITT/William Daniels was speaking, and you also get the show’s theme song. As Gizmodo notes, it’s hard to say if that is a bonus or not. In any case, tote this around and you too can feel like “a man (or woman) without a past.”
KITT was probably the most famous of the 1980s TV cars. But let’s not forget other flashy entries like the Ferrari Daytona (sadly blown up by a missile launcher) and Testarossa of Crocket and Tubbs on Miami Vice, or the Ferrari 308 owned by Robin Masters but driven into the ground by (Thomas) Magnum, P.I. The 308 didn’t have any of KITT’s tech, and the two Miami Vice cars didn’t either, apart from that first-gen corded cell phone.
With KnightTouchBar2000, you can enjoy KITT’s chaser animation without the back talk; “Michael, are you sure jumping off this cliff is a good idea? I’m not programmed for that sort of thing.”
