Mike has just been made a vice president. When he closes the door to shut out the sound of the bongo drums, the bottom map behind him briefly changes to be of South America. For the rest of the scene the map is of Central America.
Mike Cutler gives Bunny Watson an arrangement of white carnations, and she inserts one in his lapel's button-hole. At the end of the day, she and Sumner leave the office. She is carrying the white carnation arrangement as they enter the elevator. As they exit the building, the carnations are pink.
Before Bunny Watson turns to ask Richard Sumner her question during the Christmas party, she puts the bottle on the desk, but in the next shot, she is holding it again.
During the question session on the roof, Bunny reaches for the roast beef sandwich, then takes off her gloves, then reaches for the sandwich again.
When Richard (Spencer Tracy), Bunny (Katharine Hepburn) and Smithers (Harry Ellerbe) are leaving the office, Bunny's flowers are white. When they get out of the elevator and are standing in front of the building, the flowers are pink. They are still pink when Bunny and Richard get dropped off at her apartment.
After EMARAC had been present for a very short time, it's stated that EMARAC has had the data from all the books in the research department fed into it. In reality, it would've taken a large crew of keypunch (data entry) operators at least a year to input that much data.
As EMARAC's printer is set up with the keyboard facing the operator's side of the console, the printouts exit the machine the same as a typewriter. In every instance where characters on the camera side of the console want to read EMARAC's answers, they tear off the continuous sheet at the printer end and "read" the *bottom* of the printout *upside-down*.
At the end of the film someone calls with a question: what is the weight of the entire Earth. Technically that's unanswerable. One might calculate the mass of Earth but weight depends on the force of gravity, so a person might be 110 lbs on Earth but would be only 18 lbs on the Moon. Since the Earth isn't sitting on another planetary body there is no concept of weight, only its mass. Of course back in 1957 people might not have been such sticklers for this distinction.
During the rooftop picnic, Bunny answers the question about telephone numbers, but then says "I don't think there's any PLaza 2 exchange." Under the original three-letter New York City telephone exchange system, however, PLAza (or PL2) would have been the first valid Plaza exchange. By 1930, the list had expanded to PL1, PL2, PL3, PL4, PL5, PL7, PL8, and PL9.
Not only does the computer have useless rows of flashing lights (standard for TV and movie computers of the 1950s and 1960s), but it features purported reel-to-reel tapes (1) spinning at very high speeds, indicating that they were not running programs, but fast forwarding or rewinding, and (2) not connected to each other.
In the opening shot of the film at Rockefeller Center, the shot begins at ground level and tilts up the building, but it was clearly shot from the top of the building down to ground level and then reversed because all the people on the ground are walking backwards.
Sumner explains to his tour that he has a handful of punch cards containing Shakespeare's play Hamlet. He is holding no more than 20 cards. Since the text of Hamlet contains over 160,000 characters (62,000 if compressed) it would be physically impossible to store that much data on so few punch cards.
The tape drive on either side of EMERAC should have its reels running in the same direction, like a reel-to-reel tape player, but the reels are running in the opposite direction to each other, which would break the tape if there was one.
The large array of flashing white lights simply show two repeating patterns, which obviously have nothing to do with the system's processing.
Miss Costello gives Ty Cobb's lifetime batting average as .367. This information was considered correct at the time of filming in 1957. Subsequent research by baseball historians in the 1980s led to the discovery that Cobb's lifetime batting average was actually .366.
Computers were not able to accept plain text queries until the 1980's. Prior to that any query had to be entered in programming language.
Reference librarian Miss Costello (Joan Blondell) says, in response to a question about baseball star Ty Cobb, "He played only with the Detroit Tigers for 21 years." In fact, Cobb played major league baseball for 24 years - 22 years with the Tigers and two years with the Philadelphia Athletics.
When EMERAC begins to print out "Curfew Must not Ring Tonight," Bunny Watson says, "That old poem has about 80 stanzas." In fact, it has 10 stanzas, of 6 lines each.