[HN Gopher] Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
___________________________________________________________________
Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
Author : rx_tx
Score : 247 points
Date : 2023-12-14 06:23 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scifiinterfaces.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scifiinterfaces.com)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| "The scene starts with Joey sitting in front of his Macintosh
| personal computer"
|
| Oops. Joey's computer is an Apple IIgs.
| bitwize wrote:
| It has a Mac interface though.
|
| The IIGS actually had a Mac-like interface called GS/OS, but it
| looked real grotty compared to Mac OS, to accommodate the
| IIGS's lower resolution.
| lanternfish wrote:
| Hmm. Now I'm curious if you could actually get a 3d interface
| with all that information dynamically rendered running with
| reasonable performance on period accurate personal hardware -
| it's definitely in the scope of the 95 demo scene stuff.
| lulesp wrote:
| This is the vision of the cybersecurity company i'm working
| for, to render information systems in a 3d interface. It works
| fine on mid-range hardware and can render assets (hardware and
| linked users) in the thousands, for more you'd have to segment
| your interface in secondary instances.
|
| It's mainly for SecOps team tho, can't go full matrix yet on
| your home network.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| You need a working Z-buffer and then it could be pretty fast.
| S3 Trio came out in 1995 too and was decent enough.
| jsemrau wrote:
| While I loved the 3D imagination of the 90s, 3D navigation is
| not the shortest way to the needed information. Imagine your
| file structure would be organized like a video game? It's the
| same reason why transparent touch screens and VR doesn't really
| work.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| 3D interfaces so far usually mean you navigate a 3D model of
| some digital space which appears to you behind a 2D screen
| accessible with a keyboard and a mouse which are 3D physical
| objects in your 3D real world (keyboard,video,mouse).
|
| 3D interfaces are quit different without the 2D screen barrier
| and either your are inside the experience (VR) or the
| experience is outside around you (MR/AR).
| pmarreck wrote:
| Circa 2000 I interviewed for a three-letter-acronym agency that
| shall remain unnamed and they were interested in me working on
| a 3D visualization interface of traffic across a network which
| actually sounded pretty fascinating. Sort of like "packet
| filter plus visualization" after given physical location
| information about the computers in question; even without that
| information, though, it would use something like the graphviz
| algorithm (or one of its options) to lay out the map on a 2D
| plane in 3D. Different kinds of traffic was color-coded, you
| could zoom in and inspect any stream, roll forward or backwards
| in history, etc.
| ynniv wrote:
| A s/TV network/Three Letter Agency/ that wishes to remain
| nameless We have no names, man, no names. We are
| nameless. Can I score a fry? Thanks.
| dusted wrote:
| I wrote about hackers too,
| http://www.dusted.dk/pages/phlog/2023-12-02.txt the gist of that
| rant is that what you see in hackers is not what's not their
| screens, but what's in their minds, through a poetic lens.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| That's a pretty nice interpretation!
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Well said. It's amazing how often people dismiss computer
| visualization in media (< ~2005) as "unrealistic."
|
| That's not the goal!
|
| It's intended to be representative of the _process_ of
| interacting with a computer, not the interface itself. At a
| time when most viewers had little or no first-hand experience
| with a computer.
|
| If you showed a CLI then, maybe 1/20 people would understand
| it, and they'd be bored because they used it everyday at work.
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| That's exactly right! I didn't see hackers until I was in my
| mid 30s, but when they had the initial flyover of the city
| representing tables in a database ... I had a moment where I
| said "my goodness, this is the closest representation of how
| I think of data".
|
| It's like when you're reading a book - you don't think about
| the words, the concepts and people come to life in your
| brain. I feel like this is the only movie to get that that
| happens with computers, too.
| chromaton wrote:
| "I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved
| through the computer. What did they look like? Ships,
| motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept
| dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one
| day, I got in..."
| secretforest wrote:
| Tron Legacy. Such a good film. My kids and I watch it a
| few times a year. I tried watching the original from 1982
| and it just felt so... dated? Perhaps I'm spoiled like
| most people from all the great CGI and effects.
| pohl wrote:
| That was my interpretation, too, but this article shows me The
| Plauge skateboarding through physical towers, etc. Not sure
| such scenes can be written off as happening in Joey's mind.
| sgt wrote:
| I like your blog format. Kinda reminds me of Phrack.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| One of my favorite scenes is when the protagonist is in the
| airplane looking down at the city, and the buildings warp into
| computer chips and circuitry. This fits well with the idea that
| what we're seeing is more about the feeling that the characters
| are experiencing rather than what's actually on their screen.
| codingdave wrote:
| I always figured it was the closest they could do to the
| descriptions of hacking from Neuromancer. Especially since the
| computer was named the "Gibson", I figured the whole thing was
| a great big nod to it.
| Mainan_Tagonist wrote:
| This is a nice website, with an interesting purpose. Though i
| suppose reviewing sci-Fi movies notions of interfaces will soon
| clash with the dryness of reality.
|
| The 90's were wild in that sense, you could imagine that the
| internet superhighway would be a superhighway you could literally
| drive on with your Avatar, and countless movies and tv-series
| presented things thus.
|
| The noughties were way more grounded in reality, even the Matrix
| had Trinity hacking into a server using a OpenSSH exploit on a
| black and white terminal.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The 90's were wild in that sense, you could imagine that the
| internet superhighway would be a superhighway you could
| literally drive on with your Avatar, and countless movies and
| tv-series presented things thus.
|
| > The noughties were way more grounded in reality, even the
| Matrix had Trinity hacking into a server using a OpenSSH
| exploit on a black and white terminal.
|
| That's a wild contrast to try to draw, since the actual direct
| experience of the network in the Matrix (and which is the focus
| of the film) was an immersive virtual reality of exactly the
| type you are trying to contrast the portrayal in the Matrix
| with, and the "hacking in to a server with an OpenSSH exploit"
| occurred as a simulation within that virtual reality.
| Mainan_Tagonist wrote:
| True enough, though if Trinity could jump between skyscrapers
| and run against a wall before disarming 5 machine gun totting
| henchmen, i imagine she could have enabled transparency in
| her Xterm in Enlightenment.
|
| But in more general terms, the representation of computer
| interfaces, with avatars walking rigidly in 3d pastel
| coloured surroundings (as presented in a variety of examples,
| my favorite being the corporate network in the TV Series
| Profit) sort of fizzled out post 2000, when everybody got to
| owning a desktop and laptop and realised that the internet
| was just text in fact, and 3D environments were not so easy
| to navigate (remember Second-Life).
|
| That is, of course, if your online life did not involve being
| an elf in World of Warcraft, or something.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| ~1999, you would have had Pentium III @ ~500 MHz max in a
| laptop, likely less. Pentium M wouldn't release for several
| more years.
|
| So transparency was arguably still something a true hacker
| wouldn't waste cycles on.
|
| To your general point, it felt like there was a shift
| around 2000, when computers needed to be "serious business"
| and the whimsy of the 80s and 90s was scrubbed out of
| software.
|
| Honestly, I think we all would have been better off if we'd
| turned the web to something more approachable for common
| people (especially if it inspired them to be creators).
|
| Instead, we built a brutalist efficient system where most
| expression is limited to setting your background.
| anthk wrote:
| In the 90's even hackers loved some bling-bling. Maybe
| not with E16, but some WMaker with a nice backdrop and a
| transparent UXTerm was really nice and much faster than
| the emerging KDE in late 90's.
|
| Also, heck, it was cool and pretty having some city at
| night while you were day and night with URxvt with links
| or lynx on it reading media and posting to fora.
| jasomill wrote:
| Yup. Circa 1997, I switched from AfterStep to (then-new)
| Enlightenment briefly before settling on WindowMaker as a
| good balance between bling and performance.
|
| My PC at the time was a hand-me-down white box AMD 386
| (40 MHz) running FreeBSD 2.x.
| Mainan_Tagonist wrote:
| "~1999, you would have had Pentium III @ ~500 MHz max in
| a laptop, likely less. Pentium M wouldn't release for
| several more years."
|
| and, Boy, did i waste cycles on enabling every eye candy
| possible on Linux/BSD on the only 150 Mhz Pentium pro
| with 32Mb of ram i could afford in 2001-2002...
|
| "Instead, we built a brutalist efficient system where
| most expression is limited to setting your background."
|
| Common people being creative was MySpace, remember the
| eyesore?
|
| Just being sarcastic, i think the "Ugly" web of early
| HTML was actually wonderful, and we should encourage
| people to go back to it, but let's not delude ourselves
| too much, FaceStagram will always win the appeal of the
| masses.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| I think the change you mentioned (2000) has to do with
| maturity of the tech, as well as, maturity of the
| acceptance of this tech, as part of everyday life.
|
| As far as the state of the web today, you can thank
| commercial entities. Yes, they did/do contribute to the
| web's existance, but at the same time, they make it much
| worse.
| Daub wrote:
| I complelove this website. A great resource.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| _Minority Report_ came out in 2002, and I can tell you,
| actually using a computer interface like that for an extended
| period of time would be pretty exhausting.
| anjel wrote:
| OTOH,No need to fight desktop sedentary fx, the OS exercises
| you.
| btbuildem wrote:
| My fave sci-fi UI review was on the "other" site -- previous HN
| discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287912
|
| IMO "The Expanse" got futuristic UIs extremely right.
| dschuetz wrote:
| Who else is hearing the legendary soundtrack seeing those
| screengrabs?
| ivolimmen wrote:
| O yes:
| https://open.spotify.com/track/5xcunlfaZvD9BDQsLONI7A?si=0f0...
| Neil44 wrote:
| That soundtrack was amazing. Orital, Leftfield, Massive Attack,
| Prodigy, Underworld...
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| I still put Halcyon and on and on, in my playlists, entirely
| thanks to this movie. :)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| The soundtrack album was recently re-released in a 2CD pack
| with lots of extra tracks missing from the original version.
| Recommended.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Not exactly related, but I'm shocked by the amount of people,
| older people even working in IT who mock the girl in Jurassic
| Park saying "it's a Unix system, I know this", when in fact what
| they showed was a Unix system and the 3D interface they showed
| was real software SGI shipped with IRIX.
| gjvc wrote:
| most people in IT don't do any research beyond six inches in
| front of their face and task at hand.
| aa-jv wrote:
| They wanted to say "this is an SGI system!" but had to go with
| "this is a Unix system" ..
| eesmith wrote:
| Because its unlikely that the girl would have had access to an
| IRIX box, and while it was real software, it was dog-slow on
| low-end SGI without a graphics card, so she had to be using
| some pretty expensive hardware.
|
| As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with Unix
| system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX also
| had.
|
| We only used the 3D browser for our demo setup for visitors.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I don't remember her ever saying she actually has experience
| with the browser, just that she knows it. She could have just
| used UNIX in general and only read a lot about the file
| browser, or perhaps briefly tried then incredibly slow
| version.
|
| It's not even too much of a stretch to imagine she has never
| seen the file browser, but is able to figure it out on like
| one can with modern GUI apps.
| eesmith wrote:
| "I know how to use it" is a bit stronger than "I know it."
|
| fsv (the 3d file browser) was not shipped with IRIX, the 2d
| file browser was.
|
| It's a pretty big stretch.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| She didn't need to know IRIX if she knew some other flavor of
| Unix, she was probably savvy enough to use man and access
| documentation if needed.
|
| The point is though most mock the scene as though the
| software they show was entirely fictional and made up, when
| it was in fact real and was in fact still UNIX.
| eesmith wrote:
| I don't know why others mock it, but as an older person
| working in IT, I can explain why I mock it even when
| knowing it was real software SGI shipped with IRIX.
|
| (Minor correction: it was not shipped with IRIX but a free
| demo you could ftp. After 30 years I had forgotten that
| until looking at https://web.archive.org/web/20070409024417
| /http://www.sgi.co... and similar sites just now.)
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > I can explain why I mock it even when knowing it was
| real software SGI shipped with IRIX.
|
| OK, please do.
| eesmith wrote:
| Literally my top-level comment in this thread.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| I hadn't realized that was your reason for mocking the
| scene, I had thought it was just being kind of pedantic
| and making an observation about the scene.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| The one that really yanked me out of the movie was the
| first tom cruise mission impossible and he does a web
| search for 'job'.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Yeah that's pretty bad. I don't know what I'd say the
| worst movie scene was, most of my bad examples come from
| TV. That CSI visual basic example is pretty infamous.
| buzziebee wrote:
| She was the granddaughter of a billionaire so it's not
| unreasonable to imagine she may indeed have had access to
| high end hardware. "No expense spared".
| luismedel wrote:
| > No expense spared
|
| but he only has one single IT guy in oncall during the
| emergency :-)
| esrauch wrote:
| I think that part is actually explained:
|
| - the storm evacuates most people, essential staff only
|
| - Nedry deliberately creates the IT emergency situation
| to lock out the other IT people still on the island
|
| - The book has more details about how the IT system was
| over budget/rushed/flawed as another example of the
| hubris of the whole endeavor.
|
| The book has a detail I especially liked: theres an
| automatic dinosaur counting system but it was written
| such that it stops counting once it finds all of the
| expected dinos (because the spec said they couldn't
| reproduce), which delayed them realizing that the
| dinosaurs were actually mating and in a bunch of places
| they weren't supposed to be. Classic example of a bug
| caused by software working correctly exactly to the spec.
| eesmith wrote:
| The I would expect "It's an SGI, I know how to use it."
|
| Familiarity with 4dwm doesn't really transfer to NeXTStep
| or SunView, which were two other Unix window managers of
| the time.
|
| The people she interacted with would surely distinguish
| between different Unix vendors - Apollo, Ridge, SGI, Sun,
| etc. - we certainly did.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| You're being unreasonably hard on a fictional 12 year old
| lol. IRIX is UNIX. She said she knows UNIX. It's fine.
| eesmith wrote:
| I'm not hard on a fictional 12 year old.
|
| I'm explaining why someone in the early 1990s,
| knowledgeable about Unix, IRIX, and fsn, would mock the
| adults who created that scene about a fictional 12 year
| old.
|
| If the makers of The Matrix gets credit for its realistic
| looking use of nmap and a fictional "sshnuke", then
| Jurassic Park should get jeers.
|
| We don't credit Trinity for that scene, we credit the
| creators of that scene.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| No, you are being hard on the character, and it's kind of
| ridiculous. IRIX is Unix, she recognized it as Unix, it's
| not more complicated than that.
|
| It's the people mocking the scene as unrealistic, most of
| which do so because they didn't know the software seen on
| screen was real, deserve jeers.
| eesmith wrote:
| And you are being hard on me, and it's kind of
| ridiculous.
|
| Knowing Unix is not the same as knowing to use a program
| which only exists on one version of Unix, and which was
| not distributed with the OS, and which was less helpful
| at file system exploration than both the 2d file manager
| [1] and 1970s-based Unix shell tools [2].
|
| You specifically called out "older people even working in
| IT", which includes me. Just because you want to jeer at
| people who don't know what you know doesn't mean there
| aren't other reasons to jeer at the same scene.
|
| [1] Here's what the IRIX 2D file browser looked like in
| 1990:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=IRB2MkMxgy0
|
| [2] On a related note, The Great CHI '97 Browse-Off was a
| non-rigorous head-to-head contest between different
| hierarchical browsers. The Hyperbolic Browser was the
| clear winner, with Windows Explorer coming in second, and
| the DOS command-line doing pretty well until it came to
| comparison questions like "Which planet is also the name
| of a car brand?" where both categories in the ontology
| needed to be compared.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > And you are being hard on me, and it's kind of
| ridiculous.
|
| No, lol, I'm not. I'm just disagreeing with you, and
| pointing out that IMO your point doesn't have much merit.
| I don't think that's a ridiculous response to what you're
| claiming at all.
|
| > Knowing Unix is not the same as knowing to use a
| program which only exists on one version of Unix
|
| She didn't say she knew a program which exists on one
| version of Unix, she just said she recognized the type of
| system. That's it. That's the claim she was making.
|
| It's pretty similar to the hypothetical situation of a
| kid finding a mac and saying "This is a Macintosh, I know
| this" and using the finder to browse and look for a
| program to run. Same thing, with the only difference
| being Unix refers to a variety of operating systems not
| just one particular OS.
|
| And you're making a big deal about how she probably
| wouldn't have known IRIX and all this, but that doesn't
| really make sense and it's extremely nitpicky. Others
| have explained why.
|
| > You specifically called out "older people even working
| in IT", which includes me. Just because you want to jeer
| at people who don't know what you know doesn't mean there
| aren't other reasons to jeer at the same scene.
|
| As I said though, most people who jeer at the scene do so
| on the mistaken assumption that the software scene on
| screen didn't exist.
|
| I've not actually ever come across someone like yourself
| who doesn't refute that, but is just basically being very
| nitpicky and IMO unrealistic.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > Because its unlikely that the girl would have had access to
| an IRIX box
|
| She's related to Hammond, who owns an island. I'm sure he
| could get her an old box and some manuals to play with, if
| not outright a state of the art system.
|
| > As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with
| Unix system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX
| also had.
|
| But isn't that exactly the sort of thing a clever kid with
| access to fancy stuff would mess around with?
|
| > We only used the 3D browser for our demo setup for
| visitors.
|
| Which would perfectly explain why it popped up on the
| production systems. To make it look fancier for Hammond/any
| investors/the people visiting in the movie.
| anthk wrote:
| Using the 3D browser would be akin to saying "That's Linux"
| upong seeing a Compiz cube a few years ago. I mean, yes, it
| would be technically correct, but not a defining term for
| deeply knowing Linux and its intrinsics.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| It's not weird or wrong in any way though. Plenty of
| people were running compiz for a while, and a kid into
| Linux would recognize it.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Yeah, so? She's a bright 12 year old, not a burnt out and
| jaded Unix sysadmin with 20 years of experience.
| eesmith wrote:
| "would mess around with", certainly. And quickly find it
| wasn't useful for actual file system navigation.
|
| The 2D file browser for IRIX was pretty nice, with vector
| icons. https://sgi.neocities.org/1.png shows an example
| from https://sgi.neocities.org/ .
|
| I made a mistake when I said we used it for demos. We did
| not use fsv for that. I was thinking of buttonfly - see
| example to the left of http://www.sgistuff.net/software/iri
| xintro/images/irix-4.0.1... .
|
| I did try out fsv, but again, it was slow on the desktop
| machine I had, and not useful.
| 111111101101 wrote:
| When I was a kid I had access to all sorts of exotic
| operating systems. SunOS, VMS, all sorts of Unixes. I was a
| very naughty boy.
| eesmith wrote:
| SunOS and VMS were two of the most common
| workstation/minicomputer-class OSes out there, and rather
| less exotic than IRIX.
|
| I'm old enough that my college-freshman "intro to
| computers" and Fortran classes were taught on a CDC Cyber
| running NOS.
| bitwize wrote:
| What if she were originally baffled by the 3D display, and
| then saw recognizable paths like /bin and /usr and realized
| the system was actually familiar?
| butlike wrote:
| They spared no expense at Jurassic Park, you know.
| test098 wrote:
| i grew up in university computer labs (parents were grad
| students then professors). all the machines in the labs were
| SGI Indys/Indigos running IRIX 4.x/5.x. as a 12yo, i used the
| 3D graphical file browser because it was fun and cool. it was
| installed on all the machines by default because it came
| bundled in a demo CD with every machine.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| There's a modern clone of it now:
| https://fsv.sourceforge.net/
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Well, the fix was probably around the lines of:
| sudo systemctl restart gates
|
| But, whatever, I mean, there are literal dinosaurs going
| around, I guess that's the more plausible plotline.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| What is the 'that' you are referring to as far as being the
| more plausible plotline?
|
| I don't think it's weird for a kid with some computing
| knowledge to use a filebrowser to look for where a program
| might be.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Well, we are talking about managing critical infrastructure
| on a theme park riddled with dinosaurs. Potentially the
| definition of working under pressure.
|
| I wouldn't think even teenage Kevin Mitnick on Mountain Dew
| can himself bypass the terminal security (if any), prompt
| his way to the safety mechanisms, and override their
| behavior. All while being assailed by a velociraptor.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| You didn't answer my question; I just don't get what you
| are saying is more plausible. Is it that the girl knew
| Unix at all or something else?
| test098 wrote:
| pretty simple explanation: the girl in the movie is more
| talented than teenage kevin mitnick. if that's a bridge
| too far for you, i'd recommend not watching the rest of
| the movie because it's about people cloning dinosaurs
| using frog DNA.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Ah but this was pre-systemd so you would have been screwing
| around trying to find whatever script was being used to lock
| the doors after close of business.
| sgt wrote:
| Well it's IRIX, so you'd just create a little bourne shell
| script in /etc/init.d, with symlinks from e.g. /etc/rc2.d
| to start/kill it on the respective run levels.
|
| This was a pretty critical system though so why not just
| place this particular program inside /etc/inittab ?
| Izkata wrote:
| Before systemd: sudo service gates restart
|
| ...and after too, it still exists and maps to systemctl on
| ones that use systemd.
| devjab wrote:
| I think the thing I was/is most disappointed about is that I can
| buy the key caps that Cereal Killer uses for a Nordic keyboard
| layout. God damn those were cool.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Or a laptop with a translucent case!
| roughly wrote:
| I still want one. Apparently Framework looked at it, but they
| couldn't find a good plastic with the right combination of
| traits.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Bit embarrased to say I tried to implement the 3d file browser
| from this movie and failed when I was first learning C. I did get
| the 3d boxes to show up and display files/folders and it was cool
| (to me) to move them around in 3d but doing even slightly complex
| stuff required "polynomial math" which was beyond my skill level.
|
| It still saddens me irrationally to see the state of UX today. It
| isn't cool and i have many visions of doing all this stuff with
| webgl and more (not 3d boxes but futuristic yet practical UI).
| Modern UX feels like art majors designed it by a committee and
| MBAs+lawyers were the target audience. I no longer even see
| anyone in tech thinking out if the box with radicallu new
| windowing systems and alternatives to hypertext and browsers.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I'm more saddened by the state of hardware. It's amazing and
| very practical and basically perfect for everyday use... But it
| was a lot cooler back then.
|
| WebGL file management doesn't seem to hard to implement, I'm
| guessing it would be a weekend project to make a demo, now that
| one doesn't actually need math to draw 3D stuff.
| badrabbit wrote:
| > now that one doesn't actually need math to draw 3D stuff.
|
| Even for camera movements/projection stuff? News to me,
| haven't messed with 3d since around 2010.
| ptek wrote:
| Hack the planet
|
| A fun movie
|
| I wonder if it was filmed 10 years later if everyone would be
| wearing Crocs and not rollerblades.
| Ryoung27 wrote:
| Excuse me, I think you mean Heelys.
| rwmj wrote:
| Interview with the guy who made the perspex "buildings"(?) props
| that represented the central computer database, with a photo of
| one of them if you scroll down a bit:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180301013110/http%3A//hackersc...
| ulfbert_inc wrote:
| I think City of Text thing is onto something, and reminds me
| immediately of memory palace[1] method.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
| lagrange77 wrote:
| I recently stumbled upon this
|
| https://usegpu.live/demo/geometry/binary
|
| and it reminded me of the city of text.
| btbuildem wrote:
| This is really neat! I wonder how they chose to represent the
| inner structure of these binaries visually - there seem to be
| some similarities between the .exes vs the other types.
|
| Reminds me of pointing the viewport address to a block of code
| on the Amiga 500, and watching it run.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| Those are trigrams of all 3-byte sequences of binary
| executables arranged in a cube. Here are some more examples
| of that type of viz:
|
| https://codisec.com/binary-data-visualization/
|
| And here is a talk about binary visualization by the legend
| Christopher Domas, which is where I first saw it used:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bM3Gut1hIk
| aethelyon wrote:
| This is awesome, but there were a couple of great laptop
| interfaces from that movie too. Spent some quality time in the
| 90s getting AfterStep/Litestep to look like them.
| scroot wrote:
| Has anyone written about the computers/interfaces in HBO's
| "Silo"? I've been trying to find information about that because
| they seem quite interesting.
| adamomada wrote:
| It's an Apple TV show and those props definitely gave me an
| old-school Apple computer vibe. Now I'm wondering how
| intentional it is
| tecleandor wrote:
| Funny that I didn't notice until very recently that the computer
| operator was Penn Jillette, the magician!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2OYNMO_mNw
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYE2amC9vMY
| anjel wrote:
| More than magicians, Penn Gillette was in the jacket scene.
| Anyone remember existing into his bbs from the late 1980s?
| jasomill wrote:
| He also wrote a column for _PC /Computing_ magazine in the
| early '90s.
| k2enemy wrote:
| If you're a fan of the movie, this youtube channel has amazing
| interviews with cast and crew. So many great anecdotes buried
| within...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@HackersCurator/videos
| pmarreck wrote:
| I never thought such a hyperfocused channel would be this
| fascinating!
| dusted wrote:
| Oh, that's excellent! Thank you! Now I know what to do with my
| evening! ;)
| Reason077 wrote:
| Oh man. Legendary film. Young Angelina Jolie in her hacker outfit
| with her Spock haircut ... am I right?
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| You made it weird by mentioning a Spock haircut.
| js2 wrote:
| How about young Persis Khambatta in her Star Trek outfit with
| her Mr. Clean haircut ... am I right?
| Reason077 wrote:
| I was more into the young Kirstie Alley playing the sexy
| vulcan in Star Trek II. Sadly both actors are no longer
| with us :(
| NBJack wrote:
| Sorry man. Hey, have you checked out the pool on the roof
| yet?
| pmarreck wrote:
| I crushed on her then before it was cool... and then uncool
|
| Regardless, I knew she'd be "a thing" when I saw that movie
| secretforest wrote:
| I rather like the look, even now. I also liked T'Pol in Star
| Trek Enterprise.
| mportela wrote:
| This movie is the reason why I became a programmer.
|
| I watched it when I was starting in high school and got inspired
| by it. Then, I literally googled "How to become a hacker" and
| found this incredible page by Eric Raymond [0], which I used as
| an mentor throughout my high school and college years. I ended up
| developing the recommended hard skills (learning programming,
| UNIX, open source culture...) but also the "points of style"
| (martial arts, science fiction, meditation, music). In fact, when
| I was trying to search for a hacker community online, I stumbled
| upon Hacker News and haven't left ever since!
|
| As expected, I didn't become a black hat hacker as in the movie
| but, to this day, I still believe this movie changed the course
| of my life.
|
| [0] https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Which martial art? Also, what are your top 3-5 books?
|
| E.g. Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Diamond Age, A Fire Upon the Deep
| secretforest wrote:
| Good old Neal Stephenson books, but I really like
| Cryptonomicon and Reamde. I read Cryptonomicon in one day it
| was that good, and years later read it again and got more
| from it. Neal is a great writer, and I love his "wordiness",
| how he dedicated pages to the experience of eating Cap'n
| Crunch cereal.
| roughly wrote:
| Same - this is one of those generational films for certain kids
| of a certain era.
| bradbeam wrote:
| Likewise.
|
| The exposure to the hackers manifesto was inspiring.
| DustinBrett wrote:
| Even the word manifesto was new to me and got me interested
| in what that was about.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Right? "Manifesto"?
|
| Obviously commie bullshit.
|
| (Oh, 90s. And when you've got Wendell Pierce and Marc
| Anthony as your throw-away characters, props!)
| DustinBrett wrote:
| Same story for me, Hackers was great inspiration and I still
| watch it often. Hack the Planet!
| crsv wrote:
| Same. This film made me believe that it was possible to be cool
| and find a social group that were all in to tech. I grew up in
| a really rural area so this revelation of possibility, whether
| actually practical or not, heavily influenced my trajectory in
| life and in tech. It's still one of my most sentimentally
| favorite movies of all time.
| rashthedude wrote:
| You and I share the same exact journey as to how we got there.
| I've had random conversations over the years with other
| developers in my age bracket and many of them cite Hackers as
| the reason that piqued their interest in computing. What this
| movie lacks in authenticity it makes up for it with an amazing
| cast, good score and lots of fun.
| lubujackson wrote:
| My favorite line from the movie - they are huddled around
| someone's new computer and a character compliments them with:
| "Killer refresh rate!"
|
| With so many great and much more accurate hacker movies like
| Sneakers, this one was just so much fun to see evry aspect of
| hacking amplified to the "X-treme!!!"
| Ryoung27 wrote:
| My best friend and I still look at each other and say "What?
| Your mom buy you a Puter for Christmas". That movie had style.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I remember seeing this movie when it came out and, while I
| enjoyed it, I chuckled at how silly the UI graphics looked.
| However, after rewatching it years later I really enjoyed it even
| more because I realized that, yes, the UI graphics weren't
| realistic, the movie did a great job of capturing what tech
| _felt_ like at the time.
|
| I just rewatched it again recently and find it a thoroughly
| enjoyable film.
|
| It doesn't look like this site has done a review of Sneakers yet
| but I recommend they do. The interfaces are much more realistic
| for the time (even if the cryptography mathematics do suffer a
| bit)
| zshrdlu wrote:
| How nice! I've been mulling over doing exactly this for a while
| :D
| ynniv wrote:
| Cereal Killer, Lord Nikon, and Phantom Phreak, real names not
| given.
|
| Disappointing because Cereal Killer's given name was Emmanuel
| Goldstein, an alias made famous by Eric Corley, editor of 2600:
| The Hacker Quarterly. Eric consulted on the movie, and it
| probably would have sucked without him.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| That and more of the names are given in the film, so I dunno if
| this person even watched it. Lord Nikon aka Paul Cook. Phantom
| Phreak aka Ramon Sanchez! And the aforementioned nod to 2600
| for Cereal.
| jghn wrote:
| And while the connection of Emmanuel Goldstein was already
| mentioned, I always assumed Paul Cook was referencing the Sex
| Pistol's drummer
| batguano wrote:
| And "Emmanuel Goldstein" was the name of a character in the
| novel 1984. He was the widely despised "enemy of the state"
| cooked up by the government to justify their autocracy.
| mkehrt wrote:
| I don't think Cereal Killer's name is Emmanuel Goldstein. That
| was a joke.
| ynniv wrote:
| _Woah, this isn 't woodshop class?_
|
| Nope:
|
| _Get me arrest warrants on Kate Libby, alias Acid Burn,
| Emmanuel Goldstein, alias Cereal Killer, Dade Murphy, alias
| Crash Override, also known as Zero Cool, and Paul Cook, alias
| Lord Nikon. We pick them up tomorrow morning at nine o
| 'clock._
| mkehrt wrote:
| Weird.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| This whole article is so draaaaawn out. It's not supposed to be
| realistic, it's for delivering the story. Hardly any, if any at
| all, UIs back in the 80s and 90s were realistic. This level
| analysis just isn't necessary. It's a classic, legendary film for
| both the content/representation of the subculture, and the 90s
| "so bad it's good" style.
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| Probably openAI visual being fed stills from the movie.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| My favorite movie hacker tech is Tron: Legacy.
|
| They literally just used Linux and Emacs, and it looks
| _beautiful_.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| The 3rd and 4th screenshots (more so the 4th one) remind me of
| the interfaces from the older Armored Core games
| nier wrote:
| This movie introduced me to the Wipeout racing game on
| Playstation.
|
| Scene from the movie: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATlszssL-eI
|
| More info:
| https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19751/whats-the-a...
| secretforest wrote:
| I liked the movie and it reminded me of when I was a kid and my
| dad bought me a Commodore 64 and 5 1/4 floppy drive and a 1-year
| subscription to Creative Computing magazine. I spent so many
| hours learning programming and then wasted it all by going into
| the military because my parents couldn't afford to send me to
| university. Rural community and only my dad worked since my
| mother was injured. When I got out and returned back up north, I
| got a "job", got married, and had a neighbor who was a Unix
| programmer. His home office was decked out with FreeBSD, NetBSD,
| and OpenBSD servers, BSD magazines and literature everywhere. He
| talked me into using my GI Bill to go get a degree in CS, which
| is what I did. My unofficial hero since has been Theo de Raadt.
| Still using a *nix OS, still in IT.
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