LONG BEACH Old Hollywood films depicting ground-ripping earthquakes that drop whole cities into the sea often included a shot of a seismometer measuring the strength of the temblor with wild zigzags slashed across paper.

While modern equipment no longer calls for the old pendulums of the past, the telltale jagged scribbles are still produced, although by computer.

And the next time students or staff at Cal State Long Beach feel the earth rumble beneath their feet, they could see those slashes as they appear on a color monitor in the university's Geologic Sciences Department, where a new $70,000 seismometer and seismograph were installed earlier this month.

Who knows, people may even see live broadcasts from the university after the next big quake.

Purchased through $15,000 in grants from the CSULB Alumni Association and Long Beach State President Robert Maxson, the state-of-the-art equipment is made by Kinematics. While the $15,000 did not cover the full price of the system, the difference was waived by Kinematics in what Stanley Finney, chairman of the Geologic Sciences Department, called "a very nice donation.'

On the main floor of the building that houses most of the geologic science courses is a display with three flat-screen, color monitors.

One flashes images of disastrous earthquakes, including the 1933 Long Beach earthquake that killed 115 people; the 1964 Alaska quake that caused 131 deaths; and the 1995 temblor in Kobe, Japan, which resulted in more than 6,000 deaths.

The second monitor shows the San Diego area-based ANZA Seismic network to which CSULB's system is linked that tracks movements on faults throughout Southern California, with particular emphasis on the San Jacinto Fault, which slices through most of the Inland Empire.

Colored geometric shapes show where movement has been tracked on various Southern California faults within the last 34 days, when the data is transferred to a supercomputer run by ANZA, said James McKibben, director of CSULB's Science Learning Center.

A third monitor shows the actual movements recorded by the seismometer at CSULB and 20 other stations in the ANZA network. Vibrations picked up by one part of the network are cross-checked with the other stations in order to weed out man-made movements such as a semi or bus rattling the building's foundation from movements in the earth's crust.

The device that measures the movements is only slightly larger than most camcorders and sits in the basement of the school's Peterson Hall 3, protected by a metal box lashed to the floor.

By next fall, students taking introductory courses in geology will be linked into the machinery so that they can track and study geologic movement in real time, rather than relying on written texts, Finney said.

Thanks to global positioning satellite technology, the events recorded appear in the school's database within 5 microseconds, McKibben said. The network cross-checks the data with the other equipment in an equally speedy time.

"You know, you used to have guys who had to measure the marks on the paper with calipers, do all the calculations by hand and then they had to find two other guys from two other stations to cross-check their work,' McKibben said. "Now, it's done in seconds.'