The author completely missed a major point of the movie (along with the people in this thread), that it was the United States military who was pursuing research

The author completely missed a major point of the movie (along with the people in this thread), that it was the United States military who was pursuing research on a 'doomsday device' (computerized nuclear armageddon). The S.A.G.E radar defense system, adjusting for inflation, is the most expensive computer system ever assembled. The Q-32 was the crown jewel of the whole operation and it would also later become the first node in the network that today is referred to as the internet. SDC is responsible for the firsts computer implementations of relational database (KWIC), semantic networks, the first WAN & time-sharing device(Sage & Q-32) and the first complete speech recognition system (Synthex). They also trained 22,000 of the first 25,000 programmers in the United States. The term hacker was actually coined by business and military personnel to describe the decline in professional programming standards that occurred with creation of computer science department in the 60's and the unskilled students they produced who didn't properly document their code. Little computer history for all you.