My favorite was when Nedry was on the phone with his contact and Nedry was watching his contact on a video camera.
You can see the playback bar sliding past on the bottom of the screen. Nedry was talking to a Quicktime movie. 
-Joe
Yes, but that’s because they are just killing time while waiting for the tape drives they’re connected to to finish loading their file(s)! 
I forgot about the speech synth. Eh. Considering it was named after the guy’s kid, he could have been batty enough to build a speech synth into it. RC Pterodactyl, remember?
Okay, okay. But I just mounted a reel-to-reel tape today. 6250 CPS. Why? To do the frigging medicare billing. Don’t ask. You don’t want to know.
Still, all things considered, I consider WarGames at least as accurate as your average cowboy, car racing, or, heck, college movie, and more accurate than most movies since.
Not true.
I went to see Jurassic Park on opening night with a couple friends, one of whom was a major computer geek (and a great guy). The girl sits down at the computer, and there’s a brief shot where you can see the screen. My friend said “that’s Unix,” even before she said it in the movie.
It wasn’t the interface that tipped him off, but he recognized some of the directory names as being standard Unix.
I’m sitting here with about 5 black command prompt windows open right now. It’s called UNIX, kids. All the big boys play with it.
… it was Unix, you know. Very obscure Solaris graphical interface. I think Solaris. (Sun?)
VERY obscure, 3D, bizarre. That the little girl could identify it as unix is… possible, if she was a genius computer geek. Unix is pretty identifiable.
True geeks don’t use graphical interfaces – let alone those that resemble a video game. Honestly, I have ten Unix systems to deal with and I never use anything but a command prompt – the graphic interface, along with security issues, just gets in the way of getting things done quickly.
You will bow to the will of the command prompt, resistance is futile.
Well now, it’s possible that NORAD bought the same brand of voice synthesizer that the kid had. Possible even that they’re using an IMSAI microcomputer somewhere in that control room. Maybe even an Apple II Plus as well, given how advanced we’d expect NORAD to be.
(Possible — but yeah, pretty outlandish.)
I believe it was an SGI, and so probably IRIX.
… Not that I’m claiming IRIX came with a 3D game-like interface as shown in Jurassic Park. That would seem to be something tossed together for the sake of the movie.
Nothing to do with the technology, but that DHL/Mission Impossible 3 commercial made me swear off of both forever.
FWIW, Ethilrist, I would be more disappointed with a movie industry that showed the world’s most competent users clicking and dragging on Windows on the world’s most advanced computer. The fact that they use graphical interfaces at all is irritating, but saves time in some cases, and a good movie spends seconds sparingly.
The 3D directory navigator was actually off-the-shelf software and not specifically written for the movie. You can download it here: http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html [works only on IRIX].
There’s a lot of technology BS in the movies, but that 3D directory viewer isn’t one of them. Even if they hadn’t seen it before, any tech hacker worth their salt would immediately recognize the directory structure as being Unix.
I think the all time winner in this category has to be The Net with Sandra Bullock.
For those fortunate enough not to have seen it, poor Sandra is victimized by the Bad Guys, who make her drivers license, credit cards and all traces of her existence vanish from computers everywhere. At the end of the movie, she manages to upload a virus onto the Bad Guys’ computer, and Presto her identity is restored.
Who writes this stuff?
Was it EBCDIC format too?
Well…satellites do exist that can read something the size of a license plate (assuming the license plate was pointed toward the sky) – would the NSA person monitoring this care to confirm? But, yeah…you can’t “improve” the resolution after the fact. (The TV show *Las Vegas * is the world’s worst transgressor on this…they’re always “cleaning up” surveillance camera images.)
I think it’s the viewing angle that irks the most. Movie satellites often seem to be in orbit about fifty meters off the ground.
My favorite alternative to this was in Jurassic Park. Nedry had reprogrammed his computer so that when you put in the wrong password, his face would show up saying “Ah, ah, ah! You didn’t say the magic words!”
Well well, live and learn.
The few times I played around with an SGI machine, in the mid-90s, they did have a 3D file navigator program. But it simply presented the directories as “stone slabs” that twirled around and listed their contents as “carved” words. There was no helicopter pilot’s view of a virtual city with buildings, as the movie shows.
Right. Would have been funny though if the girl had said, “Oh look, it’s Unix!” — and then hit control-Z to break out of the stupid 3D thing so she could bring up xterm.
You want computers and technology in general to be accurate in movies?
OK, along with relationships, dialog, situations, people’s reactions, trials, fights…
Probably the same folks who wrote Independence Day.