Movies have never been that good at accurately representing interfacing with computers, especially in the early days. But it’s still a riot to watch what people thought it looked like.
Founditemclothing put together a montage of some of the cheesiest hacking and computer moments in 1980s cinema. Of course, a bunch of them involve Matthew Broderick, but all of them are stilted and silly in their attempt to make something so boring looking visually compelling. Who can blame them?
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11 responses to “Hacking In ’80s Movies Was Super-Cheesy”
Seeing things like “UPLOADING VIRUS” with a giant progress bar always kills me!
And they still don’t do it right.
How DARE you mock Ferris Bueller! You sir have no class *shakes fist* Wargames though… yeah that’s fair game :B
Wargames was probably closest to accurate of all of them.
Revenge of the Nerds 😀
only in 80s movies? Even today they’re still cheesy and generally pretty crap and not realistic at all. I don’t entirely blame them, real hacking is not exactly fun to watch for an observer
Yet, somehow they made it look worse in the 90s, like with The Net and incessant use of the term ‘a back door’.
not all of that was hacking though…
How is the voight-kampff test a hack?
The only film to ever get it right was the Matrix Reloaded. They used nmap to portscan and an SSH exploit from 2001 to hack into a linux system and reset the root password to zion0101 when they break into a power station. It’s like the only example I’ve seen in film where they used real tools to do it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TJuipCrjZQ – for those who are interested.
I love how they still never use a mouse on tv today. Always with the keyboard tapping away.