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.
On sci-fi, OFC I like it, but the mistery genre it's really fine as it's pretty close to debugging a problem but with real life issues.
On tech, Unix philosophy and Emacs are polarly opposite. Unix it's focused on multiprocessing parallel tools doing the work for you (preferabily scripted) where the less code your run, the better; while Emacs wants you to reuse Elisp functions everywhere, with an always-loaded philosophy and not lightweight at all if you have tons of modules in memory. Also, Emacs it's single threaded, so Emacs is very prone to be I/O locked, while Unix will spawn background subprocesses like nothing not affecting your main task at all.
The exposure to the hackers manifesto was inspiring.
E.g. Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Diamond Age, A Fire Upon the Deep
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.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180301013110/http%3A//hackersc...
Cereal Killer, Lord Nikon, and Phantom Phreak, real names not given.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
IMO "The Expanse" got futuristic UIs extremely right.
Those gestures were completely unknown in commercial UIs of the time; in fact you were lucky to find a touchscreen that didn't take three forceful stabs of your finger before it registered.
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)
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.
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.
Even for camera movements/projection stuff? News to me, haven't messed with 3d since around 2010.
Regardless, I knew she'd be "a thing" when I saw that movie
Oops. Joey's computer is an Apple IIgs.
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.
sudo systemctl restart gates
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's mainly for SecOps team tho, can't go full matrix yet on your home network.
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.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).
https://usegpu.live/demo/geometry/binary
and it reminded me of the city of text.
Reminds me of pointing the viewport address to a block of code on the Amiga 500, and watching it run.
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:
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!!!"
They literally just used Linux and Emacs, and it looks beautiful.
A fun movie
I wonder if it was filmed 10 years later if everyone would be wearing Crocs and not rollerblades.
Scene from the movie: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATlszssL-eI
More info: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19751/whats-the-a...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37082304
“Rewriting wipEout”: https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/rewriting-wipeout
As I wrote at the time: “WOW! Just a `git clone`, download and unpack the .zip with the assets (end of the blog post), type `make` and it compiles on Linux without warnings into `wipegame`, run it and it works first time!” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37086874