'Hackers' at 20 • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#91

Post by carey » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 12:55 AM UTC

rjsw wrote: post #71

buffoon wrote: post #35

Memories... Good soundtrack, even if the film did make me cringe. When it came out I was knee deep in oodles of Perl on a shit-hot upgraded SPARCstation 10 machine (not camo painted I will add). Whacked the soundtrack in my external caddied CD drive and plugged my headphones in, then spent 2 hours of frigging #defines trying to get the fucking thing to compile a CD player that worked on SunOS 4 OpenView that I'd down…

I'm guessing your CD player was workman.

Oh wow, I remember workman now. At least I had university Internet, even if the whole country's net was taken down once when someone tried a video chat.

It must have been a year or two later that I wired a doorbell between DTR (I think) and CTS on a Sparc workstation, with a program that broadcast a UDP packet to a Tcl/Tk program running on multiple lab machines whenever tcdrain() unblocked.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#92

Post by mrspeaker » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 12:57 AM UTC

buffoon wrote: post #35

Memories... Good soundtrack, even if the film did make me cringe. When it came out I was knee deep in oodles of Perl on a shit-hot upgraded SPARCstation 10 machine (not camo painted I will add). Whacked the soundtrack in my external caddied CD drive and plugged my headphones in, then spent 2 hours of frigging #defines trying to get the fucking thing to compile a CD player that worked on SunOS 4 OpenView that I'd down…

This post made my day... can I subscribe to your newsletter?

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#93

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 12:58 AM UTC

I only just recently (about a month ago)... It wasn't horrible, but not having seen it when it came out it's hard to say what I would have though 20 years ago (when I was 20), and on BBSes and a few art/dist groups.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#94

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 12:59 AM UTC

Zelphyr wrote: post #67

nfoz wrote: post #27

One of the things I love about this movie is how much it got right . The general attitude of the time, the feeling that we had in that era. This film shows what it feels like to spend all night reading through hexdumps trying to solve a complex riddle. I don't know anything else that captures that. Of course it had to be "inaccurate" to show visually what that feels like without it being super boring. It glorifies a…

I agree and tend to think of it in terms of how the movie 300 depicted the Persians as monsters. They were nowhere near as monstrous in real life but the Greek saw them that way. And the only way to convey the sense of how the ancient Greek viewed them to our modern eye was to make them hulking giants. In much the same way, Hackers had to do something to depict how we felt about computers at the time. I remember thin…

I liked Sneakers a lot... loved that movie... never saw Hackers at the time of release (only first saw it all the way through about a month ago).

I don't know that it was particularly more accurate (at least the device in question), but I think it was certainly closer.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#95

Post by fierycatnet » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 1:05 AM UTC

I don't understand the hate. Hackers was a really great niche film. It wasn't going for the Oscar but when I saw it for the first time when I was 14 it got me excited about computers. Movie was fun and soundtrack was great. When I managed to compile and use my first exploit it felt like I was one of "them". Made a few friends online that I only knew by their "hacker names" and I even formed a team. Now that I think about it those were the fun times.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#96

Post by MilnerRoute » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 1:22 AM UTC

When the producer of the movie Hackers appeared on AOL for a promotional chat room visit, some malicious technology lovers showed up and kept knocking them offline.

http://www.aolwatch.org/list/0051.html

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#97

Post by MilnerRoute » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 1:25 AM UTC

MilnerRoute wrote: post #96

When the producer of the movie Hackers appeared on AOL for a promotional chat room visit, some malicious technology lovers showed up and kept knocking them offline. http://www.aolwatch.org/list/0051.html

Here's a more detailed account of the background leading up to that attack.

http://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxiv/10.3.97/exclusive/let...

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#98

Post by jjaredsimpson » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 1:51 AM UTC

Honestly the thing I remember most about Hackers was when the credit rolled and hearing Halcyon for the first time. That changed my music tastes permanently.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#99

Post by nanonoise » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 1:53 AM UTC

jjaredsimpson wrote: post #98

Honestly the thing I remember most about Hackers was when the credit rolled and hearing Halcyon for the first time. That changed my music tastes permanently.

The most loved music soundtrack in my collection. These is also a Hackers 2 soundtrack (music inspired by). Both are pretty brilliant.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#100

Post by philsnow » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 2:03 AM UTC

crgt wrote: post #19

orionblastar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh why them? The main characters in Hackers were teenagers who went out to explore cyberspace and see what was there and hack into it. They had a "Hack the Planet" message in that movie.

It's a reference to Swordfish.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfy5dFhw3ik Because, you know, that's how hacking works...

Had nearly forgotten how much I hate that movie, and had definitely forgotten that Travolta has almost a Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg haircut.