curtsey
The entire movie WarGames is a non-starter. Even if a high-level DOD programmer were to leave in a “back door”, (doubtful), there’s no way “Joshua” would clear the password standard, there’s no way he’d throw in a bunch of video games into his DOD source code, hell, there’s no way WOPR would even exist.
On a smaller scale, he’d still be locked in that room in NORAD b/c the door lock would be a little more sophisticated than allowing you to record a set of pulse tones and play them back. And that payphone he phreaks wouldn’t even be there, there would be no pull tabs laying around, and that doesn’t work anyway.
How old are you? At the time the movie was filmed, a LOT of that stuff was true. (Excepting the whole WOPR, NORAD command center, and premise.)
If the door used a phone keypad, the vertical columns would play one note and the horizontal one would play another tone, those tones could be recorded and could be played back. I don’t remember when pull tabs were replaced with non-littering ones, but watching Wargames in the theatre, it didn’t raise any alarms.
Wardialing to find interesting computers was well known. The green-screen/audio-coupled modem stuff seemed pretty correct.
The password limitations may not have been out of character for a subcontractor, this WAS 23 years ago.
Suspend a little disbelief, man! (and I had the hots for Ally Sheedy)
Dude - did you read the OP? Specifically, this part?
(Bolding mine)
:smack:
My bad.
We still get wardialers, though.
Here’s a relatively recent example:
Home Alone (1990). Harry and Marv are after Kevin, who flees to his tree house. Marv (the archetypical bumbling sidekick) tells his leader, Harry, “He’s gonna call the cops!” Harry responds, “From a tree house?” Yes, there were cell phones in 1990 but they weren’t nearly as common then, and almost no child ever carried one. Today the notion of an eight-year-old calling the police from his tree house is easily plausible.
And isn’t one of the sequels to Home Alone that he gets separated from his parents at the airport and ends up on a completely separate plane and ends up in Paris? Oh yeah - THAT’S going to happen now!
“Oh you have no boarding pass for this international flight and we have no seat for you and you’re missing your parents? NO PROBLEM! Enjoy the trip!”
(Not really technology based.)
His parents ended up abroad somewhere, but he ended up in New York. So it was at least a domestic flight, but yeah, still not going to happen.
In mystery/suspense/thriller novels, characters often have to go to some trouble to get ahold of important information. In recent years I’ve found myself thinking “You could just look that up online now” a lot. For instance, in the Tim Powers novel Last Call the villains need a contact at the DMV to do a reverse address lookup, but this is now easy to do on WhitePages.com.
The wonderful classic movie, Bells Are Ringing (Dean Martin and Judy Holliday) involves an answering service known as Susansaphone. It begins with images of rotary phones and people missing calls. There was no call forwarding, no pagers, no cells phones (hell, they didn’t even have Touch Tone). Susansaphone was revolutionary.
It’s a great romantic comedy, but I don’t see a Broadway revival of it happening anytime soon, unless it could be updated in some way (or just taken as written).
They could still revive it. They’d just have to do it as a circa late 50’s period piece.
But stuffdoes still happen.
That even happens in science fiction.
The Star Trek transporter was created fairly early (to make the shows cheaper to film – landing shuttles or the ship would increase costs). But every show after that had to invent some reason that the landing party couldn’t just beam back to the ship to get out of trouble. Otherwise the whole dramatic tension is gone.
Not really a plot ruiner, but the semi-famous first lines of the book Neuromancer “The sky was the color of Television, tuned to a dead channel” evokes the opposite of what the author intended now that most TV’s jump to a pleasant sky blue when they’re set on a dead channel.
Which is why I said they could do it as written…
“I love rock & roll…put another DIME in the jukebox baby!”
Not the most stellar rock song ever, but still…when was the last time you saw a jukebox that took dimes?