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I thought it was so cheesy that it had to be fictional, because of all the misrepresentations of computer interfaces in other movies like "Hackers." This is app

by Aqueous 13y ago

I thought it was so cheesy that it had to be fictional, because of all the misrepresentations of computer interfaces in other movies like "Hackers." This is apparently a common assumption. It's admirable that SGI was experimenting with interfaces. However in this situation having to navigate such an interface created a very real safety hazard. I suppose she could have used the regular file browser instead - or perhaps the substantially less exciting XTerm.

itsnotvalid 13y ago
Worst thing is when a movie did most things with real UI being thought as mocking things up. So latter movies increasingly use fake UIs instead.
- Kiro 13y ago
  I don't understand.
nitrogen 13y ago
Sometimes life imitates art -- I spent a good amount of time in high school making my Linux system's bootup and login screens look like those on Hackers.
vidarh 13y ago
I suspect in SGI's case it was probably mostly another demo to show off their graphics capabilities. Nobody used it, but everyone I know who tried out the SGI boxes at uni had their five minutes of fun with it. Things like that and running xearth as the background when logging in on the Indy's made them stand out massively next to the Sun boxes with monochrome terminals in our computer labs, which seemed ancient and outdated. Heck, even booting them, with their nice blue gradient background and metallic frame around the window where the boot messages scrolled by set them apart from the boring Sun boxes. SGI early on had a lot of the design sense and flair that Apple has today.
SimHacker 13y ago
Anybody remember "Buttonfly"? Now THAT was actually USEFUL. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826qq6pslJk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826qq6pslJk http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?coll=0650&db=man&fname=/usr/share/catman/u_man/cat6/buttonfly.z http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?coll=...

by Aqueous 13y ago

itsnotvalid 13y ago

Worst thing is when a movie did most things with real UI being thought as mocking things up. So latter movies increasingly use fake UIs instead.

Kiro 13y ago
I don't understand.

nitrogen 13y ago

Sometimes life imitates art -- I spent a good amount of time in high school making my Linux system's bootup and login screens look like those on Hackers.

vidarh 13y ago

I suspect in SGI's case it was probably mostly another demo to show off their graphics capabilities. Nobody used it, but everyone I know who tried out the SGI boxes at uni had their five minutes of fun with it. Things like that and running xearth as the background when logging in on the Indy's made them stand out massively next to the Sun boxes with monochrome terminals in our computer labs, which seemed ancient and outdated. Heck, even booting them, with their nice blue gradient background and metallic frame around the window where the boot messages scrolled by set them apart from the boring Sun boxes. SGI early on had a lot of the design sense and flair that Apple has today.

SimHacker 13y ago

Anybody remember "Buttonfly"? Now THAT was actually USEFUL. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826qq6pslJk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826qq6pslJk http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?coll=0650&db=man&fname=/usr/share/catman/u_man/cat6/buttonfly.z http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?coll=...