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Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

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Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#121

Post by eesmith »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #103
eesmith wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#122

Post by eesmith »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #70
eesmith wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> I can explain why I mock it even when knowing it was real software SGI shipped with IRIX. OK, please do.

Literally my top-level comment in this thread.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#123

Post by jasomill »

anjel wrote: post #110
tecleandor wrote: post #39

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

More than magicians, Penn Gillette was in the jacket scene. Anyone remember existing into his bbs from the late 1980s?

He also wrote a column for PC/Computing magazine in the early '90s.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#124

Post by PrimeMcFly »

eesmith wrote: post #121
PrimeMcFly wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 becaus…

> 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.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#125

Post by PrimeMcFly »

eesmith wrote: post #122
PrimeMcFly wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can explain why I mock it even when knowing it was real software SGI shipped with IRIX. OK, please do.

Literally my top-level comment in this thread.

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.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#126

Post by mkehrt »

ynniv wrote: post #89

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.

I don't think Cereal Killer's name is Emmanuel Goldstein. That was a joke.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#127

Post by ynniv »

mkehrt wrote: post #126
ynniv wrote: post #89

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.

I don't think Cereal Killer's name is Emmanuel Goldstein. That was a joke.

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.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#128

Post by mkehrt »

ynniv wrote: post #127
mkehrt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Cereal Killer's name is Emmanuel Goldstein. That was a joke.

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.

Weird.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#129

Post by jasomill »

anthk wrote: post #42
ethbr1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~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 wo…

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.

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.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#130

Post by rashthedude »

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…

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.
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