Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

Post by butlike » Thu, Dec 14, 2023, 5:00 PM UTC

eesmith wrote: post #22

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #12

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.

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.

Post by PrimeMcFly » Thu, Dec 14, 2023, 5:08 PM UTC

eesmith wrote: post #102

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being unreasonably hard on a fictional 12 year old lol. IRIX is UNIX. She said she knows UNIX. It's fine.

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 sc…

Post by roughly » Thu, Dec 14, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

jonhohle wrote: post #63

devjab wrote: post #13

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.

Or a laptop with a translucent case!

Post by bradbeam » Thu, Dec 14, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

mportela wrote: post #82

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 "point…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 14, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

bitshiftfaced wrote: post #72

dusted wrote: post #5

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.

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.