On 26 Sep 2002, Eric Smith wrote:
> Gooijen H <GOOI_at_oce.nl> writes:
> > What I remember from that time is that as result of the movie
> > questions were asked in the Senate *if* the scenario shown in
> > the movie *could* be possible ...
>
> No, because the military doesn't buy computers from Burger King.
>
> The rest of the movie was *completely* realistic, though. :-)
The scanning (a.k.a. "war-dialing") was very real. The speed with which
the calls connected was not (less than a second between dialing and
ringing...back in those days ESS was not widely deployed, maybe a few
large cities had some ESS switches, but the whole country was still
connected by mainly clunky analog trunking and long distance calls just
did not go through that quickly).
The part where he fools a payphone into giving him a dialtone by shorting
the mouthpiece to the phone was a scene stolen out of reality. I'm sure
Ma Bell loved that one. In the old days, when you put a coin into a
payphone, the coin would actually be the object that grounded the
telephone line by causing a short, which would result in the CO providing
a dialtone (all payphones work on "ground-start" lines). That trick still
worked years later, but only on local calls (since toll and long distance
calls went through the AT&T ACTS computer for billing). I don't know if
it still works, but my guess is "probably not".
The scenes where he is "talking" to the computer: complete fantasy ;) I
wish we AI that good even today.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Fri Sep 27 2002 - 17:51:41 BST