# Horrible Movie and TV tropes about computers **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** movies\ **Created:** [September 6, 2026, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852 "2026-09-06T04:51:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![ZonexandScout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zonexandscout/32/544_2.png) [@ZonexandScout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZonexandScout)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/21 "2026-09-06T12:09:19Z")
Right, **kenobi\_65**! The main difference now is that the protagonists rely on “AI” to achieve exactly the same effect. No spoilers, but a certain Amazon Prime series that features a big guy is doing this exact thing this week. “Want to read the text on a document laying on a desk in a still photo taken 20 years ago? The document is only 20 or 30 pixels wide in the photo, but AI can do it!” Ironically, in the days of analog video recording, we could often “frame average” to actually enhance video details so we could read license plates, identify car models, etc., for static objects. Modern video compression techniques make this much more difficult when resolution is roughly the same. ---
**Author:** ![CaveMike](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cavemike/32/16379_2.png) [@CaveMike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaveMike)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 12:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/22 "2026-09-06T12:15:31Z")
> [@ZonexandScout](#): > > The main difference now is that the protagonists rely on “AI” to achieve exactly the same effect. Exactly. AI / Super Resolution algorithms can do exactly this – enhance the resolution of an image. What makes it ironic for procedurals is that AI performs this task by literally inventing pixels that look “good enough”. It’s an evidence forger. If you apply it to a face, you’re going to get details from the faces you’ve trained it on. ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 12:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/23 "2026-09-06T12:37:37Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > I haven’t watched _ **NCIS** _ in years, but one thing I remember from its early days is how Tim and Abby would pound on her keyboard together whenever there was a glitch in the computer. My WAG there is that the show in-universe often indicated that those two characters were often on the same exact wavelength and could pull stuff like that off. Oddly when they later tried to date each other, after seeming to work well early on, her neuroses caused them to break up. ---
**Author:** ![Shoeless](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/shoeless/32/7099_2.png) [@Shoeless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shoeless)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/24 "2026-09-06T14:07:54Z")
One that always bothers me is facial or fingerprint recognition, where you see hundreds of images per second flipping past on the monitor until it finds a match. Also, hacking passwords one character at a time. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/25 "2026-09-06T14:21:11Z")
I have seen movies or television shows in which someone is transferring money (perhaps stolen) and the transfer takes several minutes as the on-screen amount counts up. It’s being portrayed as if it’s a file transfer. ---
**Author:** ![Darwins\_Finch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darwins_finch/32/20304_2.png) [@Darwins\_Finch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darwins_Finch)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/26 "2026-09-06T15:56:40Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > The creators of that show thought, "Well, it’s a computer, and since we don’t know jack shit about computers that must mean the audience is even stupider than we are they must know even less than _we_ do. The movie _Weird Science_ used similar “'80s computers are just magic” logic. As for tropes: the screen image being projected on the face of the viewer. To paraphrase Morbo from _Futurama_: monitors do not work that way! Another trope: computer whiz types some simple commands and generates complex 3-D images. _Star Trek: The Voyage Home (The One With the Whales)_ did this with Scotty typing the formula for transparent aluminum into an '80s Macintosh computer and we see complex atomic diagrams and other images being created. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/27 "2026-09-06T16:41:14Z")
Oh god, before the mid 1980s when most people had no experience interacting with computers, there were so many. When a (room-sized) computer was performing some calculation, they’d show tape drives spinning back and forth. A friend and I were discussing one of these scenes once, and he said “maybe it’s a Turing machine”. When a computer was searching for something, like a name in a database, a monitor would show all the candidates flashing by. Because a computer can’t search for something without displaying it on a screen. For some reason this one persisted long after the days when people were familiar with Google and other search engines, and knew that that’s not how searching works. In the otherwise excellent _War Games_, a computer slowly finds a password one letter at a time, apparently trying all possibilities (of course, based on the previous trope, it displays each letter that it tries. How does it know when it has found a partial password? Fictional computer databases have a surprisingly diverse collection of information. We need to find all green Toyotas with dented fenders owned by someone who once worked for this bank and has a mole over his left eyebrow. No problem, just search for it! What database, especially back in the 1980s or 1990s, contains all this information? ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/28 "2026-09-06T16:53:20Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > Because a computer can’t search for something without displaying it on a screen. Just as an aside: I used to work for a company that made software for laser printers. One of the things we were working on was speeding up the time it took Autocad to print a drawing. When it was rendering the data, Autocad displayed a little text “pinwheel” made up of sequential characters: / | \ - / | \ - (or something like that.) We found that turning off that little display **doubled** the performance! ---
**Author:** ![blondebear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blondebear/32/1022_2.png) [@blondebear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blondebear)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/29 "2026-09-06T17:14:45Z")
In Galaxy Quest, Gwen’s only job is to ask the computer questions and repeat the answers back. ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/30 "2026-09-06T17:17:53Z")
> [@blondebear](#): > > In Galaxy Quest, Gwen’s only job is to ask the computer questions and repeat the answers back. [“Look! I have one job on this lousy ship, it’s _stupid_, but I’m gonna do it! Okay?”](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yPfyMJYWTlY) ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/31 "2026-09-06T17:21:17Z")
> [@blondebear](#): > > In Galaxy Quest, Gwen’s only job is to ask the computer questions and repeat the answers back. True, but in the movie, all of the actors recognized that it was a non-sensical and silly thing. OTOH, the alien Thermians, who thought that the TV show was a series of “historical documents,” and who built a functional replica of the ship from the series, assumed that Gwen’s role _was_ important, and made it so that only she could give commands to the ocmputer. ---
**Author:** ![abcdefghij](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/43a26b/32.png) [@abcdefghij](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/abcdefghij)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/32 "2026-09-06T18:01:01Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > How does it know when it has found a partial password? It can hear a tumbler fall into place ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/33 "2026-09-06T18:12:34Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > I haven’t watched _ **NCIS** _ in years, but one thing I remember from its early days is how Tim and Abby would pound on her keyboard together whenever there was a glitch in the computer. This very scene popped into my head when I saw the thread title. I am convinced whomever wrote that episode did so as a way to demonstrate utter contempt for their audience. It was so mindbogglingly stupid I can’t help but think it was deliberate way to say, “You idiots will watch anything!” ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/34 "2026-09-06T18:17:36Z")
> [@commasense](#): > > In an episode of _The Prisoner_ (1967), Number Six says he knows a question a supposedly omniscient computer can’t answer. I was just about to post about that computer. The other thing is that (and this is more a case of “Guessing Wrong on Where Technology is Going”) the output of the computer isn’t on a screen or even typed on a normal sheet of paper. It’s one line of type (looks like Times Roman) on a long strip of paper. Was the stock market ticker an example of peak tech? Is that how they thought computers would communicate with us? ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba9def/32.png) [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Asking_Questions)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/35 "2026-09-06T18:31:19Z")
I posted in another thread the following example, one year ago. It’s such a good example, it needs to be mentioned again: > [@Stupid Computer tricks in Television and Movies](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-computer-tricks-in-television-and-movies/1021359/9): > > In the 1988 Parker Stevenson series “Probe” (one of those genius problem solver shows popular at the time) a mad supercomputer AI takes control and kills people by manipulating real world things, such as setting traffic lights so cars crashand kill the driver, and similar happy hooey. The AI would watch people by hijacking surveillance cameras. Now in 1988 the world was not interconnected like that (and arguably, not even to that extent today). If you made this show today, yeah, at least it wou… You won;t believe who started that thread… ---
**Author:** ![echoreply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/echoreply/32/3641_2.png) [@echoreply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/echoreply)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/36 "2026-09-06T18:37:18Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > it displays each letter that it tries. How does it know when it has found a partial password? Microsoft Lan Manager, or something like that, used to encrypt passwords in 7 character chunks. So an 8 character password was really 7+1, and 12 characters was 7+5, etc. Even at the time, brute forcing 7 characters only took a few hours. Brute forcing 1 character only took a few seconds. Encrypt “0”, compare it to the stored encrypted password, then encrypt “1”, etc., and when a match is found, print it out. This did have the side effect of providing a very nice movie type output of the password being revealed in chunks. Double stupid of the movie trope of password being revealed 1 character at a time, is that if the password really can be decrypted like that, then the complexity only grows linearly by length. If it takes at most 40 seconds to guess 1 character, then an 8 character password will take at most 240 seconds to guess. Might as well just use your kid’s name as the password. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/37 "2026-09-06T18:45:58Z")
You can watch the password being guessed one character at a time in some types of timing-based SQL injection. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/38 "2026-09-06T18:48:56Z")
> [@FairyChatMom](#): > > Ah, the days of computers with flashing lights and beep-boop-beep sound effects!! Blinkenlights are real: > **[Blinkenlights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights)** > > In computer jargon, blinkenlights are diagnostic lights on front panels of old mainframe computers. More recently the term applies to status lights of modern network hardware (modems, network hubs, etc.). Blinkenlights disappeared from more recent computers for a number of reasons, the most important being the fact that with faster CPUs a human can no longer interpret the processes in the computer on the fly. The term has its origins in hacker humor and is taken from a famous (often blackletter-... ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/39 "2026-09-06T18:51:50Z")
Well, _I_ believe… ---
**Author:** ![echoreply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/echoreply/32/3641_2.png) [@echoreply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/echoreply)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852/40 "2026-09-06T18:58:27Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > some types of timing-based SQL injection Does that require the password to have been stored in plain text in the database? > [@DPRK](#): > > Blinkenlights are real: A very long time ago Hewlett Packard paid me as part of a focus group to evaluate the manual for an automatic tape loader. They’d have me read a bit of the manual, and then execute commands on the drive to do things based on what I’d read. At the very end of the session the marketing people asked me what was my overall impression of the device. I explained it needed more flashing lights. They scoffed, and I told them when I show the VP of technology the tape drive he just spent $80,000 on, and it is just a beige box that clicks and whirs, he’s not going to be impressed. Flashing lights make it seem like something is happening. After the marketing people left, the guy they had running the camera and recording equipment told me I was right about the blinkenlights. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-movie-and-tv-tropes-about-computers/1032852.md?page=3)