[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).