[wpietri]

Please nobody let Hollywood see this blog.

Somebody's going to say, "Man, we went to all that trouble to make it look realistic. But it doesn't work. Fuck it. Bring back the guy who did the interfaces for Jurassic Park. And the guy who writes Wesley Crusher's dialog."

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Update: I love that my comment mocking excess nitpicking now has triggered triple-redundant nitpicking.

[famousactress]

The Jurassic Park stuff wasn't done by a "guy", it was done by a team of folks, of which my mom was a part. (Specifically she helped pull together some of the spinning 3D xray skull stuff, wrote some c-shell scripts and was part of the sales team that sold the Sun systems to the movie). Also, the UI that you're probably talking about is this thing, and it's (sadly) real: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

[archangel_one]

The most unrealistic thing about that wasn't the interface itself, it was the 10-year-old girl who says "This is Unix, I know this!"

[rbanffy]

Not to mention the whole dinosaur thing...

[archangel_one]

Yeah, but a movie called "Jurassic Park" with no dinosaurs would be pretty woeful. The same movie without 10-year-old experts in esoteric Unix UIs would have worked just fine.

[rbanffy]

It's OK to suspend incredulity for entertainment. I enjoy watching Star Trek even if I cringe when I imagine how implausible it is.

[jgarry]

Google: real devices from star trek

Could be that something in the near future as simple as relativity was 100 years ago will solve the hardest ones, namely transporter and ftl tech.

Then again, it was funny as hell to see the flying car in Captain America.

[famousactress]

No way. That little neckbeard girl was awesome, and I refuse to believe she doesn't exist somewhere.

[sp332]

As mentioned before, the filesystem browser in Jurassic Park was a real program, called fsn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

[pyre]

  > interfaces for Jurassic Park

Replace Jurassic Park with "Operation Swordfish" or "Hackers," and you might be on to something. Especially since the Jurassic Park interface was a real program that actually existed.

[adorton]

Hackers is funny, but I watched it recently and was surprised at the realistic touches. In one scene, a character is showing off his "hacking" books - which included the dragon book, and a Unix book I believe is real.

[alanfalcon]

The best part about Hackers is that they hired Emmanuel Goldstein to serve as a consultant to get the technical details right... and he decided it would be fun to completely troll the movie producers, giving us what we got.

Hackers is an absolutely fantastic and hillarious movie once you're watching it with that in mind. Especially since Cereal Killer is either named after the 2600 editor or else just uses his name in jest when he says "uh, this isn't Woodshop?"

I used to listen to the movie on repeat all day while restoring compromised accounts at Blizzard; it kept me going when my eyes wanted to go cross and my brain wanted to shut down from looking at WoW's "the Matrix" all day tracking stolen virtual goods.

[blhack]

THANK YOU

This movie gets so much completely unnecessary hatred. Yeah, it's a joke, but there is plenty of little nods to "real" culture in there. To me it has always been pretty obvious that it was supposed to be silly, but that the people making it knew what they were doing.

I'm pretty sure most of the books from that scene were actually real books.

[mindcrime]

I'd have to watch it again to be 100% sure, but - going from memory - I believe every single book mentioned in that scene was real. Certainly the "pink shirt book" (IBM Guide to PCs) is real, as is the Dragon book (compiler theory) and the "Rainbow books".

[taejo]

The pink-shirt book is not the IBM Guide to PCs, but "The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC". Incidentally, the blue-shirt book ("Peter Norton's DOS Guide") was the book that turned me into a computer nerd :)

[mindcrime]

The pink-shirt book is not the IBM Guide to PCs, but "The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC".

Right, that's the one I was thinking about. It definitely stands out because of the pink shirt on the cover. So they got the exact title wrong (or I just mis-remembered what they called it in the movie), but still... that scene was fairly accurate for a hollywood movie involving computers. :-)

[pyre]

When I mentioned "Hackers," I was thinking more of the 3D UI they were navigating to search for files on the mainframe.

[alanfalcon]

It's my life's ambition to one day use a file system as pretty and pointless as that one. Barring that, I may just create one for use in my "hacker" puzzle game for iOS that has no actual relation to real hacking (as is the case most "hacker" themed games).

[Simucal]

A lot of the phone phreaking scenes in the movie were pretty real as well.

[mindcrime]

Yeah, the "red box" stuff was legit, it's just that A. few payphones seem to even exist anymore, and B. the ones that do are mostly COCOTs, not Telco operated phones that are (or were) susceptible to red-boxing.

[peterwwillis]

Yeah, but you can op divert COCOTs or just hack them directly (one of my schools' COCOTs had a flaw where you could make the modem think you were still operating for free after dialing toll-free if you hadn't hung up the phone completely, rendering free unlimited calls)

[mindcrime]

Even better, you can just beige box off them if you can find the demarc point, which is usually on the backside of the building where the phone is. Since all the "magic" that makes it a "pay" phone is in the phone itself, the line it's hanging off of is just a plain old phone line, with full toll call ability and everything.

Back in the mid 90's, when I was a little bit into the phreaking scene, me and my buddies used to always beige box off of a COCOT to dial into the modem for the local phone switch, so we could play around. We found a payphone at a gas-station halfway in the middle of nowhere that closed fairly early, so we'd just pile my laptop in the car, drive out there, park about 40 feet from the phone, run a long ass cable to the demarc box and then sit in the car and hack/phreak. Good times... :-)

[Natsu]

The viruses mentioned were real, too, even if their usage was silly.

"Type cookie, you idiot!"

[mindcrime]

"Cancer, brain... Brain Cancer?"

[sp332]

Swordfish was really funny to me because Hugh Jackman had the "kinetics" of a hard night of hacking exactly right, while he's typing at that ridiculous interface.

[pavel_lishin]

There's also something to be said for staying up all night and finishing off a bottle of wine.

[oliciv]

This one?

http://www.siliconbunny.com/fsn-the-irix-3d-file-system-tool...

[nsmartt]

I was just happy to see SQL used at all.