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Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
- LeoPanthera 3y ago"The scene starts with Joey sitting in front of his Macintosh personal computer" Oops. Joey's computer is an Apple IIgs.
- bitwize 3y agoIt has a Mac interface though. 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.
- lanternfish 3y agoHmm. Now I'm curious if you could actually get a 3d interface with all that information dynamically rendered running with reasonable performance on period accurate personal hardware - it's definitely in the scope of the 95 demo scene stuff.
- lulesp 3y agoThis is the vision of the cybersecurity company i'm working for, to render information systems in a 3d interface. It works fine on mid-range hardware and can render assets (hardware and linked users) in the thousands, for more you'd have to segment your interface in secondary instances. It's mainly for SecOps team tho, can't go full matrix yet on your home network.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoYou need a working Z-buffer and then it could be pretty fast. S3 Trio came out in 1995 too and was decent enough.
- jsemrau 3y agoWhile I loved the 3D imagination of the 90s, 3D navigation is not the shortest way to the needed information. Imagine your file structure would be organized like a video game? It's the same reason why transparent touch screens and VR doesn't really work.
- jimmySixDOF 3y ago3D interfaces so far usually mean you navigate a 3D model of some digital space which appears to you behind a 2D screen accessible with a keyboard and a mouse which are 3D physical objects in your 3D real world (keyboard,video,mouse). 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).
- pmarreck 3y agoCirca 2000 I interviewed for a three-letter-acronym agency that shall remain unnamed and they were interested in me working on a 3D visualization interface of traffic across a network which actually sounded pretty fascinating. Sort of like "packet filter plus visualization" after given physical location information about the computers in question; even without that information, though, it would use something like the graphviz algorithm (or one of its options) to lay out the map on a 2D plane in 3D. Different kinds of traffic was color-coded, you could zoom in and inspect any stream, roll forward or backwards in history, etc.
- ynniv 3y agoA 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dusted 3y agoI wrote about hackers too, http://www.dusted.dk/pages/phlog/2023-12-02.txt http://www.dusted.dk/pages/phlog/2023-12-02.txt the gist of that rant is that what you see in hackers is not what's not their screens, but what's in their minds, through a poetic lens.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoThat's a pretty nice interpretation!
- ethbr1 3y agoWell said. It's amazing how often people dismiss computer visualization in media (< ~2005) as "unrealistic." 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.
- necrotic_comp 3y agoThat's exactly right! I didn't see hackers until I was in my mid 30s, but when they had the initial flyover of the city representing tables in a database ... I had a moment where I said "my goodness, this is the closest representation of how I think of data". 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.
- chromaton 3y ago"I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day, I got in..."
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- Mainan_Tagonist 3y agoThis is a nice website, with an interesting purpose. Though i suppose reviewing sci-Fi movies notions of interfaces will soon clash with the dryness of reality. 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.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoMinority Report came out in 2002, and I can tell you, actually using a computer interface like that for an extended period of time would be pretty exhausting.
- anjel 3y agoOTOH,No need to fight desktop sedentary fx, the OS exercises you.
- xsmasher 3y agoWhat it got right was swiping and pinch/zoom though; five years before the iPhone was released. 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.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> 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. 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.
- dschuetz 3y agoWho else is hearing the legendary soundtrack seeing those screengrabs?
- ivolimmen 3y agoO yes: https://open.spotify.com/track/5xcunlfaZvD9BDQsLONI7A?si=0f09331c37314d8d https://open.spotify.com/track/5xcunlfaZvD9BDQsLONI7A?si=0f0...
- Neil44 3y agoThat soundtrack was amazing. Orital, Leftfield, Massive Attack, Prodigy, Underworld...
- sonicanatidae 3y agoI still put Halcyon and on and on, in my playlists, entirely thanks to this movie. :)
- LeoPanthera 3y agoThe soundtrack album was recently re-released in a 2CD pack with lots of extra tracks missing from the original version. Recommended.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoNot exactly related, but I'm shocked by the amount of people, older people even working in IT who mock the girl in Jurassic Park saying "it's a Unix system, I know this", when in fact what they showed was a Unix system and the 3D interface they showed was real software SGI shipped with IRIX.
- gjvc 3y agomost people in IT don't do any research beyond six inches in front of their face and task at hand.
- aa-jv 3y agoThey wanted to say "this is an SGI system!" but had to go with "this is a Unix system" ..
- eesmith 3y agoBecause its unlikely that the girl would have had access to an IRIX box, and while it was real software, it was dog-slow on low-end SGI without a graphics card, so she had to be using some pretty expensive hardware. 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.
- eternityforest 3y agoI don't remember her ever saying she actually has experience with the browser, just that she knows it. She could have just used UNIX in general and only read a lot about the file browser, or perhaps briefly tried then incredibly slow version. 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.
- eesmith 3y ago"I know how to use it" is a bit stronger than "I know it." fsv (the 3d file browser) was not shipped with IRIX, the 2d file browser was. It's a pretty big stretch.
- devjab 3y agoI think the thing I was/is most disappointed about is that I can buy the key caps that Cereal Killer uses for a Nordic keyboard layout. God damn those were cool.
- jonhohle 3y agoOr a laptop with a translucent case!
- roughly 3y agoI still want one. Apparently Framework looked at it, but they couldn’t find a good plastic with the right combination of traits.
- jonhohle 3y agoiBook G4s had too and bottom panels that could have their paint stripped to be transparent. The earliest iBooks were translucent. Maybe a hunk of machined gorilla glass? There are translucent lower receivers for AR-15s that are both light and durable[0]. Perhaps there is still hope. 0 - https://www.tnarmsco.com/store/tnarms15/tnarms15-clear/ https://www.tnarmsco.com/store/tnarms15/tnarms15-clear/
- _8j50 3y agoBit embarrased to say I tried to implement the 3d file browser from this movie and failed when I was first learning C. I did get the 3d boxes to show up and display files/folders and it was cool (to me) to move them around in 3d but doing even slightly complex stuff required "polynomial math" which was beyond my skill level. 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.
- eternityforest 3y agoI'm more saddened by the state of hardware. It's amazing and very practical and basically perfect for everyday use... But it was a lot cooler back then. 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.
- _8j50 3y ago> 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.
- eternityforest 3y agoI'm assuming you probably still need some math to make everything look actually good, but you could probably get something working just with assorted random hackery. Most of the libraries seem to just be "Put X object on the screen at Y coordinates and rotation and size with Z texture and material", it's not like you're dealing with how rendering actually works by hand and figuring out what color each pixel should be. But I've never done much of anything in 3D, aside from CAD work so idk.
- ptek 3y agoHack the planet A fun movie I wonder if it was filmed 10 years later if everyone would be wearing Crocs and not rollerblades.
- Ryoung27 3y agoExcuse me, I think you mean Heelys.
- PretzelPirate 3y agoThey should remake this movie with the same script and the same actors.
- rwmj 3y agoInterview with the guy who made the perspex "buildings"(?) props that represented the central computer database, with a photo of one of them if you scroll down a bit: https://web.archive.org/web/20180301013110/http%3A//hackerscurator.com/pages/interviews/crew.html?who=peterchiang https://web.archive.org/web/20180301013110/http%3A//hackersc...
- ulfbert_inc 3y agoI think City of Text thing is onto something, and reminds me immediately of memory palace[1] method. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
- lagrange77 3y agoI recently stumbled upon this https://usegpu.live/demo/geometry/binary https://usegpu.live/demo/geometry/binary and it reminded me of the city of text.
- btbuildem 3y agoThis is really neat! I wonder how they chose to represent the inner structure of these binaries visually - there seem to be some similarities between the .exes vs the other types. Reminds me of pointing the viewport address to a block of code on the Amiga 500, and watching it run.
- mk_stjames 3y agoThose are trigrams of all 3-byte sequences of binary executables arranged in a cube. Here are some more examples of that type of viz: https://codisec.com/binary-data-visualization/ 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bM3Gut1hIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bM3Gut1hIk
- btbuildem 3y agoThanks! My first questions there were about the choices of the cube dimensions (where the stream folds, etc, what's best to make cyclic patterns stand out, how come we see diagonal artifacts as on a heatmap) - the video seems like it covers that and so much more.
- aethelyon 3y agoThis is awesome, but there were a couple of great laptop interfaces from that movie too. Spent some quality time in the 90s getting AfterStep/Litestep to look like them.
- scroot 3y agoHas anyone written about the computers/interfaces in HBO's "Silo"? I've been trying to find information about that because they seem quite interesting.
- tecleandor 3y agoFunny that I didn't notice until very recently that the computer operator was Penn Jillette, the magician! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2OYNMO_mNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2OYNMO_mNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYE2amC9vMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYE2amC9vMY
- anjel 3y agoMore than magicians, Penn Gillette was in the jacket scene. Anyone remember existing into his bbs from the late 1980s?
- k2enemy 3y agoIf you're a fan of the movie, this youtube channel has amazing interviews with cast and crew. So many great anecdotes buried within... https://www.youtube.com/@HackersCurator/videos https://www.youtube.com/@HackersCurator/videos
- Reason077 3y agoOh man. Legendary film. Young Angelina Jolie in her hacker outfit with her Spock haircut … am I right?
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoYou made it weird by mentioning a Spock haircut.
- js2 3y agoHow about young Persis Khambatta in her Star Trek outfit with her Mr. Clean haircut … am I right?
- Reason077 3y agoI was more into the young Kirstie Alley playing the sexy vulcan in Star Trek II. Sadly both actors are no longer with us :(
- NBJack 3y agoSorry man. Hey, have you checked out the pool on the roof yet?
- pmarreck 3y agoI crushed on her then before it was cool... and then uncool Regardless, I knew she'd be "a thing" when I saw that movie
- secretforest 3y agoI rather like the look, even now. I also liked T'Pol in Star Trek Enterprise.
- mportela 3y agoThis movie is the reason why I became a programmer. 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. [0] https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
- throw1234651234 3y agoWhich martial art? Also, what are your top 3-5 books? E.g. Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Diamond Age, A Fire Upon the Deep
- secretforest 3y agoGood old Neal Stephenson books, but I really like Cryptonomicon and Reamde. I read Cryptonomicon in one day it was that good, and years later read it again and got more from it. Neal is a great writer, and I love his "wordiness", how he dedicated pages to the experience of eating Cap'n Crunch cereal.
- roughly 3y agoSame - this is one of those generational films for certain kids of a certain era.
- bradbeam 3y agoLikewise. The exposure to the hackers manifesto was inspiring.
- DustinBrett 3y agoEven the word manifesto was new to me and got me interested in what that was about.
- lubujackson 3y agoMy favorite line from the movie - they are huddled around someone's new computer and a character compliments them with: "Killer refresh rate!" 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!!!"
- Ryoung27 3y agoMy best friend and I still look at each other and say "What? Your mom buy you a Puter for Christmas". That movie had style.
- Zelphyr 3y agoI remember seeing this movie when it came out and, while I enjoyed it, I chuckled at how silly the UI graphics looked. However, after rewatching it years later I really enjoyed it even more because I realized that, yes, the UI graphics weren't realistic, the movie did a great job of capturing what tech felt like at the time. 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)
- calgoo 3y agoSneakers is one of my favourite hacker movies. I have always loved the scene where they trace his travel path based on sound. And it was the first time I saw how an interface for blink people worked.
- zshrdlu 3y agoHow nice! I've been mulling over doing exactly this for a while :D
- ynniv 3y agoCereal Killer, Lord Nikon, and Phantom Phreak, real names not given. Disappointing because Cereal Killer's given name was Emmanuel Goldstein, an alias made famous by Eric Corley, editor of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Eric consulted on the movie, and it probably would have sucked without him.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoThat and more of the names are given in the film, so I dunno if this person even watched it. Lord Nikon aka Paul Cook. Phantom Phreak aka Ramon Sanchez! And the aforementioned nod to 2600 for Cereal.
- jghn 3y agoAnd while the connection of Emmanuel Goldstein was already mentioned, I always assumed Paul Cook was referencing the Sex Pistol's drummer
- batguano 3y agoAnd “Emmanuel Goldstein” was the name of a character in the novel 1984. He was the widely despised “enemy of the state” cooked up by the government to justify their autocracy.
- mkehrt 3y agoI don't think Cereal Killer's name is Emmanuel Goldstein. That was a joke.
- ynniv 3y agoWoah, this isn't woodshop class? 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.
- mkehrt 3y ago
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoThis whole article is so draaaaawn out. It's not supposed to be realistic, it's for delivering the story. Hardly any, if any at all, UIs back in the 80s and 90s were realistic. This level analysis just isn't necessary. It's a classic, legendary film for both the content/representation of the subculture, and the 90s "so bad it's good" style.
- wsintra2022 3y agoProbably openAI visual being fed stills from the movie.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoMy favorite movie hacker tech is Tron: Legacy. They literally just used Linux and Emacs, and it looks beautiful.
- throwaway743 3y agoThe 3rd and 4th screenshots (more so the 4th one) remind me of the interfaces from the older Armored Core games
- nier 3y agoThis movie introduced me to the Wipeout racing game on Playstation. Scene from the movie: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATlszssL-eI https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATlszssL-eI More info: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19751/whats-the-arcade-game-kate-and-dade-play-in-the-movie-hackers https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19751/whats-the-a...
- AlbertoGP 3y agoAnd it is now possible to play it in modern computers, compiled from source, as reported 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37082304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37082304 “Rewriting wipEout”: https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37086874
- secretforest 3y agoI liked the movie and it reminded me of when I was a kid and my dad bought me a Commodore 64 and 5 1/4 floppy drive and a 1-year subscription to Creative Computing magazine. I spent so many hours learning programming and then wasted it all by going into the military because my parents couldn't afford to send me to university. Rural community and only my dad worked since my mother was injured. When I got out and returned back up north, I got a "job", got married, and had a neighbor who was a Unix programmer. His home office was decked out with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD servers, BSD magazines and literature everywhere. He talked me into using my GI Bill to go get a degree in CS, which is what I did. My unofficial hero since has been Theo de Raadt. Still using a *nix OS, still in IT.