Network. You airgap computers from the outside world but they are networked to each other. With one method of getting things onto the server (often cd rom so it can be trackable), with a highest level security person, probably behind a locked door somewhere.
Could we please get back to TV and movie tropes?
That’s been known for over a decade.
“The made in China e-cigarette had malware hardcoded into the charger, and when plugged into a computer`s USB port the malware phoned home and infected the system.”
German researchers demonstrated at a session during this summer’s Black Hat security conference how they could infect USB devices with hardware-level malware. The malware would modify the firmware, evade traditional security defenses, and launch attacks. Which include impersonating a keyboard to log keystrokes and deleting content of internal storage.
Not as egregious as other examples presented but Jumpin’ Jack Flash shows an amber monochrome monitor transform into an EGA display. I can’t find a video of the process, which is triggered by the code key, but here’s a before & after.
Heere, Comr…friend, is free charging cable!
I’m not sure, but In the older movies and TV shows in computer rooms with mainframe computers, I doubt they would have the typical computer room sound that comes from the air cooling units.
A lot of those computers look exactly alike because they often WERE the same computers. Effects houses in Hollywood kept renting them out.
If you had banks of rotating tape drives, they were probably Burroughs B205:
Lots of blinking lights? IBM AN/FSQ
AS time has gone by there are lots of other computers that have been pressed into “gee-whiz” service. Here’s a website with more than you probably ever wanted to know:
Oh, cut the bleeding heart crap.
I always liked the ex-DoD computer banks in The Time Tunnel, Even in the middle of the week’s crisis, Lee Meriwether was able to solve the problem by calmly typing commands on one of the complex’s keyboards.
They just saw it as a female secretary doing her job.
Those were left over from the Jupiter 2.
I’d like to say - that as an ex-analyst programmer, I think the old cliche of the computer expert being a young, single, geek with no social skills, even less fashion sense, who wears enormous thick glasses, and spends all his free time playing obscure computer games and partaking in endless on-line arguments about sci-fi/fantasy realms, all while drinking copious amounts of Diet Coke, is rather outdated and mildly offensive.
Some of us don’t even like Diet Coke.
I’d like to add the one where the computer’s display is a holograph in mid-air, which the users then manipulate in order to get the computer to do stuff. Not a keyboard or mouse in sight.
This is what I continually scratch my head over…I can get retina-pixel 120 Hz refresh display in my pocket, but if I send a crappy low-rez black and white .pdf form to my printer it sits “spooling” for seconds/minutes in a print queue waiting for…nothing. I guess all of those crates of surplus Speak n Spell CPUs from the 70s have to be repurposed into something.
I remember in the early 2000’s a show called 24, which contained a room full of government agents doing hacky things on computers and talking to Keifer Sutherland in the field. When hacking into other people’s systems, one of the techno jargon sounding phrases they would tell each other was “Try recompiling the header files!” which, for non-programmers, can only be described as “that is not how any of this works”. It is not a thing you do in normal software development, let alone hacking.
I mean, if we had the technology to make a display like that, it probably would be a popular interface. And it’s clearly not our tech, appearing only in things like superhero movies and far-future SF.
That’s not what they thought.
They thought: “Tron made a lot of money. We want some of that action.” That was all they were thinking.
Anyone else remember Billion Dollar Brain? Plenty of whirling tape reels there.
My OH is happy that I’ve long since stopped passing comment on tech jargon in shows and movies, a standard one we now say is “reverse the polarity”, a popular one from Star Trek and Stargate.
But mentioned elsewhere recently by me in Community: Cut the hard line to the mainframe
Not in an office situation. Imagine if everyone had that! Everyone could see what everyone is doing.
“Ah Jim’s surfing the Dope again!”
Two smaller, but more real-world based complaints. People, especially in an office setting, that don’t have screen lock. Cops come up and start going through the computer without even a by-your-leave.
In Leverage, Parker could rope down, hang upside down and blindly put a drive in a USB port. And get it right on the first try. No way!