War Games

From: Anthony Clifton <wirehead_at_retrocomputing.com>
Date: Tue Sep 23 18:35:42 1997

> > Thirdly, the cheapy paperback book made when the movie came out, based on
> > the movie, descibes a much more hackeresque computer in his room...it
> > describes how he put it together with "chewing gum and baling wire" and
> > how Malvin and Jim Sting helped him with parts and advice and how he
> > learned more spending one summer with them at the computer center than he
> > had in a year in Mr. Liggett's biology class.
>
> Melvin is it? That nerd is the BEST! "That thing's probably got top
> secret data encryption algorithms!"
>
I think it's Malvin not Melvin but I could be wrong.
 
> "Mr. Potato-Head! MR. POTATO-HEAD!! Back doors are not secret!"
>
"Do you remember when you asked me to tell you when you were acting
rudely and insensitively? Well, you're doing it right now." It sounds
EXACTLY like conversations between me and this skinny techno-dweeb I work
with.
 
> > 1983 - Wargames - Hackers
> <spawned a generation of wannabe "hackers">
>
Not ALL of them were wannabes. But I plead the fifth.
 
> > 1991 - Pump Up the Volume - Pirate Radio DJs (read alt.radio.pirate)
> <bleah> <well, not bad actually>
>
Trust me. The wannabe Pirate DJs are FAR more pathetic than were the mid
80s hacker wannabes.

> > 1996 - The Craft - Counter-Culture Religion
> <oh please>
>
It's just like anything else. There's a real counter-culture behind the
subject but the movie creates a wave of folks who know NOTHING about the
reality of the counter-culture and instead just end up adhering to a new
set of stereotypes.
 
> How about _Hackers_? That surely set off the latest wave of techno
> dweebies who think just because they can connect to a URL they've hacked
> into a system.
>
I don't think so. Not from what I've seen. The technology was too
buried under techno music and skateboards. And although it was about
hackers even more directly than was Wargames, it gave even LESS realistic
information about how to begin than did Wargames. At least wardialers
and poor security were REAL things in the 80s.
 
> > All the screens in the War Room were REAL BTW...they were driven by an HP
> > Vector Graphics generator coupled with a video projector of some sort and
> > then color was added in post-production. Although my memory of the
> > article could be a bit off.
>
> Ok, we have a conflict of nerd movie trivia here. Was it CompuPro S-100
> boxes or HP Vector Graphics generators?
>
CompuPro boxes were used to drive CRT displays like on David's desk at
home while the HP units were used for the big-screen displays in the War
Room. Those are CRISP clean lines on those big screens...a raster
display did NOT create those. Even the Kobyashi Maru simulator in Star
Trek II, which was done with a Digistar vector graphics system (one of
which is at the Science Center of Iowa here in Des Moines) didn't look as
good as those vector maps of the world in the War Room in Wargames.

Now it's possible that CompuPro S100 boxes were being used to DRIVE the
HP Vector Graphics displays but those big displays were NOT done on a
Microangelo card. I wish I still had the article. It was in an
electronics engineering type magazine YEARS ago...like '84 or '85.
 
Speaking of Sandra Bullock in The Net....there were computers in The Net?
;-D

Anthony Clifton - WireHead Prime
Received on Tue Sep 23 1997 - 18:35:42 BST