More Than 20 Years of the Web on the Big Screen

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "WSJ.com has compiled clips from a dozen movies over the past 23 years that depict the internet, with varying degrees of accuracy. Among the selections: WarGames, Sneakers, .com for Murder, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The Matrix Reloaded used real Linux code, while Mission: Impossible had the improbable email addresses Job@Book of Job and Max@Job 3:14. In a related article, WSJ.com reviews some of the more-absurd Hollywood conventions when it comes to the web. Harry Knowles, of Ain't It Cool News, says, 'The thing that always gets me is watching people send emails. You click "send" and the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen. I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane.'"

Web != Internet

[turgid]

Come on, this isn't the BBC's Technology section or PeeCee Shopper magazine.

Re:Web != Internet

[aclarke]

According to Wikipedia, the first web browser [wikipedia.org] wasn't released until February 26, 1991. That seems as good a place as any to mark the beginning of the "Web", which would make it a little over 15 years old.

You're right - you'd still hope that even now, Slashdot submitters and editors would understand the distinction between the www and the internet.

This is nothing...

[William Robinson]

..compared to what I saw in a Hindi movie, called "Amar Akbar Anthony".

A scene of blood transfusion is going on. Mother needs blood. The blood from her 3 sons is getting in a bottle 6 feet above ground defying all rules of gravity. The blood is mixed online and then comes down through 4th tube for their mother.

There are many, but this one was classic.

Re:Could you even shoot a computer screen?

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to avoid the flicker problem, they wire into the monitor to make sure that the sync between monitor and camera are, well, synced.

Re:jurassic park

[Rob T Firefly]

Allthough that's a common complaint about that scene, the GUI she recognizes as UNIX was actually a real Silicon Graphics 3D File System Navigator for UNIX.

BEEP!

[Dubpal]

Great article! It's not just the web that gets misrepresented in movies, though. Most computers in film are generally similar in that they're always generating some sort of sound. Anything happening on screen, in some cases just scrolling down a window, is accompanied by a click or a beep or some noise, assumedly, to make sure you didn't miss it. Besides being completely unrealistic, the thought of having to actually work at a computer that noisy, or even a room of computers that noise would drive anyone insane.

Re:jurassic park

[Anonymous Coward]

That program was real, although only for IRIX systems. It's still available as a download here [sgi.com]. There is a free implementation for BSD/Linux systems here [sourceforge.net] as well.

Surveilance camera's

[mwvdlee]

I can't believe they forgot this; I've seen it in dozens of movies and TV series, including "realistic" ones like CSI.

Surveilance camera catches a blurred, grainy, black and white image with a 2x2 pixel head on it, software enhances the face into a highly detailed 3D model and even autodetects the name of the person.

Re:Wow

[Zak3056]

Clearly you haven't seen Hackers. TYPE COOKIE!!

Oddly enough, you picked one of the few things in that movie that was more or less accurate. The Cookie Monster "virus" (not really a virus in the modern sense of the word, just an annoying piece of code) was around in the 1970s, and would randomly pop up "Cookie! Gimme cookie!" on ttys. Typing "cookie" would make the prompt go away. Typing "chocolate chip" would remove the virus.

Re:Accurate or not

[DarthBart]

One of the ways I've heard the voice synth explained is that it was pretty likely that both Matthew Broderick's character and the government bought the voice synth equipment from the same place.

Most of the voice synth hardware in the 80s used the same voice synth chip, the venerable SPO256-AL2 from General Instruments...so yes, everything is going to sound similar, if not the same.

Anti-trust

[pupeno]

Nobody mentioning anti-trust ? One of the best movies where computers look like they are and where a great struggle of today is shown.

Re:Wow

[geoffspear]

Q. The President of the United States of America flies a fighter plane against alien ships.

A. So what's your point? Admittedly with your current draft-dodging coward of a president, I can understand your skepticism (if you're not American, I apologise for that).

Our current draft-dodging coward of a President was actually trained as a fighter pilot (in a unit that had no realistic chance of seeing combat, but that's hardly relevant to whether he could fly a fighter plane if he needed to.)

At the time the film was made, the previous President had been an actual combat fighter pilot. So no, not unrealistic at all. Although if someone told me that either of the Bushes would be an effective pilot in combat during their presidencies, years after having flown anything at all, I'd be a bit skeptical.

Re:Accurate or not

[AKAImBatman]

Breaking launch codes a single digit at a time was one thing they got glaringly wrong

Will people please stop complaining about this? If you've read Tanenbaum's book on Operating System Design, you'd know that this was a very real hack. In the system he describes (Tandem Computer, I think?), users could attach a listener to the page fault handler to know when a page fault happened. The system also checked passwords one character at a time.

A common method of breaking the super-user password was to align the password with the page boundary. If a page fault occurred, the hacker would know that the correct letter or digit had been found. The hacker would then move the password one character back in memory so that the next digit would be over the page boundary. This process was repeated until all the characters were found.

As a result, these computers were actually capable of being hacked "one character at a time" like you see in movies. Hollywood was just slow to update to the latest methods used.

Re:Accurate or not

[AKAImBatman]

Sure, but how and why was the voice synth connected to his modem/terminal program?

Well, at home he explicitly connected it to show off for his girlfriend. As for the government computers, have you seen their accessability requirements? :-P

Re:jurassic park

[Jethro]

...which someone wrote as a result of the movie, not before the movie.

It was actually fairly useful.

Re:Web != Internet

[kalidasa]

Why both with the Wikipedia article, when you can post links to the inventor's own history [w3.org] of the first web browser [w3.org] (source code; written for NeXTStep for 680x0 I believe).

Re:Wow

[monkeydo]

Actually, members of Bush's unit did see combat. Bush tried to volunteer for the program that would have taken him into combat, but by the time he had enough flight hours, the jet that he was trained to fly was being phased out.

Movie with real code, AntiTrust

[SavedLinuXgeeK]

Anti trust is one of my favorite movies, but something really cool about the way they did the code in the movie, was that they actually tied real code output to the actor's key presses. So while the actors knew nothing of *nix code or programming, you could look at the output and be impressed that it wasn't the lame commands of "Open door", or "Kill slow white guy". Movies are getting smarter, because the public is getting smarter.

Re:I remember "The Net"

[camg188]

I rented "The Net 2.0" a couple of weeks ago. In the first scene the heroine is checking her bank account over the internet. While she is distracted, it shows her balance count down to zero, like an odometer in reverse. I guess the hacker was making 0.01 withdrawls in rapid succession that got posted immediately and somehow refreshed her browser every tenth of a second. After that, I turned off the movie and switched to Cartoon Network because I wanted to watch something a little more realistic. I guess it's the same feeling a mechanic gets watching the General Lee jump a creek, destroy it's frame and then be complete fine in the next scene.

Sneakers

[BigFootApe]

Overall, this film was not a bad offender. The clip shown was of Janek's black box, which was the film's McGuffin. The technology behind it is not really described in detail, except that it has encryption cracking technology hard wired in.

Throughout the film, technology behaves properly (pretty well). TV cameras do what TV cameras are supposed to, security systems are bypassed by breaking into wiring closets and such. The worst scene for accuracy, by far, was the telephone trace.

Re:jurassic park

[imaginaryelf]

Um, I actually USED that graphic file system viewer on an SGI workstation in 1992, BEFORE Jurassic Park came out in 1993.