I’ve probably watched Hackers over a hundred times. My all time favourite movie. My first crush as a young teenager was Burn. It led to a career in software. So many kindred spirits on this thread - makes me smile.
And after 30+ years of watching Hackers, it only occurred to me recently that the biggest noob in the movie Joey beat the Gibson, twice. Sure he had assistance the second time, but still poetic imho.
I've seen the movie countless times. It was only last year that I learned it was "butter zone" and not "border zone". And I never understood why Nikon called it "border zone" as it made no sense in context. But I also had never heard the term "butter zone". So there you go.
Hack the planet.
This is such a call back and what a nice touch to add the sound to it too. That whole OST is incredible, I still pull orbital and prodigy into my current work playlists. What a fun movie.
I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it. One could argue that I loved it all along given that I watched it so many times... but there was a distinct moment where I let go and that's when I was able to see just how wonderful this movie really is.
I adore it. And some of the representations are the best I’ve seen anywhere. Kids exploring for the fun of exploring, not to hurt anyone but just to learn? The clock whirling at 4AM while someone hyperfocuses on code? The way they tease each other but genuinely respect their abilities? It’s beautiful.
There are some niche 3D file system browsers/shells out there, but none as captivating as what's shown in the movie (or the linked "animated experience") that I can find.
Not quite filesystem navigation, but SGI IRIX's Performance CoPilot software had an IrixGL (OpenGL's precursor) UI for monitoring things like memory state, CPU/storage loads, etc.
The PCP is absolutely nowhere _near_ the graphical wizardry of the state of this app, and the overlay of executing code atop a given directory structure is quite beautiful (practicality be damned), but I can see the inspiration.
I do wonder if, on a modern Linux system with SELinix, this model (code accessing a directory) is actually closer to viable? SELinux's contexts/labels for subjects overlaying with the same for objects can, I imagine, be visualized. The normal access patterns would be way too overwhelming, I think - but exceptions/policy violations? :ponder:
I let go of fanboying on what Hollywood "did to" the story and instead just decided to be thankful something I love was given a new medium / audience / interpretation... and voila! now I have two things to love.
It's still fun to point out where things could've been done differently, but instead of actually disliking the film(s) because of those things, it's just another mechanism that lets me talk to my friends about something. Much more fun than riding home in silence in any case. ;)
> I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it.
I never managed to reach your third time. Once was enough for me, at the time, to decide it was an awful movie which didn't have anything to do with hackers or computers and which was terribly overacted, and that was that. Filed under yet another "Hollywood just doesn't get it", subsection "so bad it's embarrassing".
Much later I realized I had missed a cult classic. Oh well. I still think it's a bad movie, but I'm ok with other people loving it... maybe that's my growth moment.
I, too, have such a work playlist entitled "Hack the Mainframe." It's got this type of stuff along with 90s/early 2000s breakbeat songs that ended up shoehorned into car and techno thriller movies at the time. I know a lot of this music was reviled as sellout trash at the time but I was too young to know any better when I first heard it and think it still holds up phenomenally well.
In the 1990's and for us Gen-X'ers, the worst thing you could do was to sell out; to take the mans money instead of keeping your integrity. Calling people and bands 'sell outs' (sometimes without justification!) was to insult them.
With the rise of 'influencers' the opposite appears to be the case; people go out of their way to sell out and are praised for doing so. This is a massive change in the cultural landscape which perhaps many born in the 2000's aren't aware of. (Being aware of this helps give some perspective to Gen-X media and films like hackers).
This is exemplified in Wayne's World product scene. I later found out none of the companies shown in the scene had paid for their products to be in the scene. Its also one of the most iconic scenes from the movie.
This is insightful. But I'm not sure it's completely true, I think people just have shifted their perception of what selling out means.
Content creators on YouTube, for example, get criticized when they literally sell their brand to a larger conglomerate. It seems people do not complain if they do sponsorizations tho.
I'd argue the very words creating "content" implies something commercial is already in mind and is a driver, rather than just doing your own thing online and not caring (such showing a video of your band/hobby on YouTube in case anybody is interested).
To a Gen-X'er, the former sounds like they are already a sell out :-)
I certainly agree with you that perceptions have shifted.
I agree with you and I find the term "creating content" awful, even though I'm forced to use it because it's something people immediately understand.
"Content creator"... what happened to artist, playwright, painter, hobbyist, etc? It makes it seem as if they were making stuff for a corporation to sell.
Can recommend such a mix, too. Gather select works of The Chemical Brothers, The Dust Brothers, Bassbin Twins, Crystal Method, DJ Krush, Dub Pistols, Lunatic Calm, Meat Katie... and you're Somewhen Else during it. Works for commutes/trips, too.
Damn dude this hurts. My friend took his own life last year, and Hackers was our absolute favorite movie back in high school. I mean even as late as 2022 we were messaging each other the Hacker manifesto, hack the planet, you know all the good stuff. Sam Singh, you would've loved this man. I miss you homie. hack the planet.
The movie is obviously technical garbage but one thing it did well was capture that early hacker counterculture spirit. I think a lot of us can appreciate that for the warm blanket it is and forgive its technical accuracy and story flaws.
I find this and Starship Troopers to fit in a similar niche for me. When I first saw them I found them very cringey, horrible, couldn't stand it. Hackers for the reasons being discussed here. ST because of how bastardized it was from the source material.
But over time I grew to love both of them. In both cases I started to appreciate how they weren't trying to be faithful representations, but rather capture a particular ethos in a cheesy & over the top way. And both of them I think hit their mark well in that regard.
Bastardized? It's satire and not at all subtle about it. You can of course argue that it's poorly executed satire, but judging it based on how faithful it is to the source material is rather missing the point.
It's my favorite movie of all time, even though it's one of those movies that I don't expect anyone else to like. It's just a shot of joyful nostalgia right into my veins every time I watch it.
Explorers, the Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix movie from the mid-80s, is my #2 for the same reasons.
Is Explorers the one with the Rollscanhardly joke?
Stand By Me is in my top 5 for the same reasoning. I grew up in very small town out in the boonies where my friends and I would go exploring in the woods/creeks just without finding a body.
I was a bit too young for Stand By Me. The subject matter was just too serious for me at that age. But I also grew up in a small town in the country where exploring was a normal thing.
I would meet kids from college that were from much larger towns and they'd complain "I grew up in so-and-so and there's NOTHING for kids to do there!"
I'd think to myself, "you have no idea what you're talking about. I used to go to your town to do stuff!"
Last month they had a rerun of the movie at the cinema in Dublin (IE) and went to see it with a friend. It was such a surreal experience because after watching it on my laptop so many times I could hear the laughter and the jokes of the audience on the cheesy hacking scenes, it was like watching the movie in 4D, I enjoyed it a lot!
I even brought my PowerBook Duo 280c along with me
Watching with a big public group of people you mostly don't know but maybe should is a special experience. This may depend on region, but in the US there used to be frequent midnight openings for superfans like myself. People dress up in costumes, local shops hand out prizes and it's an event. Saw Phantom Menace this way, LOTR, Watchmen, and maybe others, but I haven't seen a midnight opening offered in years. Maybe the theater managers are swimming in the pool on the roof.
Love it, what a great throwback, especially with the OST.
In Firefox is there a way to play this without FF popping up the search box on every key press? Maybe there's a way for the JS to override the default FF search functionality?
The animation is cool, but I just wanted to note for Hackers fans and movie nerds that the scenes inside the "Gibson" that this animates were actually done via practical effects.
I really love how kids today are so inundated with 3D CGI that when they see well done practical shots like this and my other go to favorite of the submarines in Hunt For Red October it is immediately assumed as CGI as well. Then again, adults are no less fooled either. The size of the sets is also surprising but makes sense when the size of a film cameras used defined the scales. The HBO intro is another example that makes the rounds.
I think it’s also important to remember that there are tons of terrible practicals out there, we just don’t think of them because they were bad and forgettable. Lots of great CG too that you likely never recognized as CG. Sicario is littered with examples. You’d be hard pressed to call out even most of them.
That's true on there being lots of terrible practical effects out there. The parent lauded Raiders of the Lost Ark for its practical effects. In contrast, Last Crusade was a great movie that had a few practical effects that were terrible. The scene with the tank going over the edge of the cliff is so bad and so fake that I could help rewind and pause to laugh at it when I was a kid.
Sure, the tank rolling at the bottom looks a bit like a model, but it isn't nearly as jarring as the part where the shot of the guy in the tank looks like it came from another world entirely and has been badly edited in on top.
I highly recommend the 88 films 4k blu-ray release for those who love Hackers. I recently was able to purchase an unopened VHS tape as well. I have a brand new VCR coming so I can have a proper experience.
The proper experience is to copy it onto an old VHS, worn out and a bit stretched in places. Play it for the umpteenth time on a 1980s VCR feeding a fuzzy old tv in the basement for background noise (and a killer sound track) as you beat your head against a crt monitor wondering why your code won't compile.
Bonus points if you pause to watch the movie and wonder "how have I seen this movie countless times and only just now noticed there's a 6th hacker in the 'main' crew?".
Only thing I can remember is a blue 3½ floppy with "trek4" handwritten on it so it must have been "found" by my relative that owned the st at the time.
This is awesome, and remimds of my favourite fact which is that the jurrasic park unix system was actually a real unix system running a real file browser. File browsers ended up converging om a more useful, but way less cool design[0].
I grew up hacking in the 1980s and I watched this movie and I totally hated it. Me and the hackers around me were more like War Games, but with skateboards and BMX bikes. On our best days, I likened us to the characters in the movie Sneakers, but no way, they were far more elite than us.
Then this Hackers movie came out and it seemed like a laughable clown caricature of hacker culture. It was insulting, like I imagine Big Bang Theory is to many.
Then I went to the Bay Area, and hung out at places like New Hack City and 2600 meetings, and I loved those people and the movie made more sense:
- War Games was a movie for 1980s hackers.
- Hackers was a movie about 1990s hackers.
So I re-watched the movie. I still hated it. But, I get it.
And no, I've no idea which movies are a similar anthem for 2000s/2010s hackers. Let me know.
The writer of Hackers, Rafael Moreu, went to New York 2600 meetings and talked to various members of MoD (a hacker group which had a book written about them by a local New York reporter, Joshua Quittner, who later worked for Wired and then Time/Pathfinder if anyone remembers that).
The names and handles of the movie reflect this - Cereal Killer, Plague, Joey, Razor - all handles of local New York people. Phreak in a sense too. Some of the kids went to Stuyvesant high school, where scenes were filmed. The kid getting raided in his shower happened locally. The plant worker almost getting shot by a flare gun held by people trashing happened locally. As did other things.
Some other national things made it in, like the Hacker's manifesto written by an LoD member.
Some things were invented for the movie. There was no attractive 19 year old Angelina Jolie type hacking along with the boys as shown in the movie. These guys were not rollerblading through Manhattan together. There was no Cyberdelia nightclub everyone hung out at, although some of the guys might have gone together once in a while to the nightclubs popular at the time (The Tunnel /Limelight / Palladium / Club USA / Webster Hall).
LoD and MoD's heydays were more in the 1980s. By the first year or two of the 1990s, both were pretty much defunct, if my memory serves.
I was acquainted with several members of both groups, and I don't remember them really resembling the Hackers movies in appearance or personality. But I lost touch with them in about 1989-1990 or so, due to the next phase of my life kicking off.
I never saw this movie back in the day, but now I want to.
Just listening to Halcyon & On & On is putting a lump in my chest. That era in time was just so fantastic and I don't think it's just because I was 21 and utopian.
I think I could perma stay in 1995/96, Groundhog Day style. Just relive those same "halcyon" days over and over perfecting and absorbing everything over and over.
A+ app, I turned on sound and was not disappointed.
Love the movie, got a spray can and sprayed my whole keyboard army green after watching it then realized I can't 10 finger type. What a golden age of interesting young people in computer security. Roughly one year later (iirc), I read "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" which might have been my most influential IT related read. It's probably tied with "Man-Computer Symbiosis" :)
I like Wargames much more. Still, people is right that we should take the 'hacking' (cracking) scenes artistically, as a metaphor on what's happening inside the mind of a cracker.
This is good progress but the 1995 movie is still superior.
There many details in the movie, like the sound of electricity going through the circuit, the camera path is more like a spline with rotations in more axis, etc.
Easily the most quoted part of the film, aside from “Hack the planet!!!!” … but also an amazing prediction! All the devices in our pockets are RISC machines. That did change everything.
"Okay, we need proof that we were here... right uh... Okay, yeah, Garbage, gimme Garbage."
My wife and I both love this movie. I thought it was cheesy and unrealistic when it dropped, but it's reflective of a mid-90s era when technology was something to be excited about and there was a lot of hype about "cyberspace" and such nonsense. That's also when I got into internetworking, Linux, and all that stuff. And electronic music. Hackers made people with my interests seem way cooler and sexier than we really were.
I realized the other day that Hackers doesn't really have a depiction of the social milieu of the elite hacker—the BBS. But The Net kinda does. So, point to The Net.
Ironically aestheticically wise the best hackers (as in the original sense) would just depict a half busy and utterly boring plan9/9front desktop and tons of physical (and digital books). Forget about ricing (except for constrast and readability, such as using Zukitre instead of Adwaita for GTK). Usability first.
I’ve probably watched Hackers over a hundred times. My all time favourite movie. My first crush as a young teenager was Burn. It led to a career in software. So many kindred spirits on this thread - makes me smile.
And after 30+ years of watching Hackers, it only occurred to me recently that the biggest noob in the movie Joey beat the Gibson, twice. Sure he had assistance the second time, but still poetic imho.
Hack the planet <3
You’re in the butter zone now, baby!
> You’re in the butter zone now, baby!
I've seen the movie countless times. It was only last year that I learned it was "butter zone" and not "border zone". And I never understood why Nikon called it "border zone" as it made no sense in context. But I also had never heard the term "butter zone". So there you go.
"im a real wild child i'm a wild one, im a wild one!!"
aaaah! joey! joey! thank you everybody!
Hack the planet. This is such a call back and what a nice touch to add the sound to it too. That whole OST is incredible, I still pull orbital and prodigy into my current work playlists. What a fun movie.
I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it. One could argue that I loved it all along given that I watched it so many times... but there was a distinct moment where I let go and that's when I was able to see just how wonderful this movie really is.
I adore it. And some of the representations are the best I’ve seen anywhere. Kids exploring for the fun of exploring, not to hurt anyone but just to learn? The clock whirling at 4AM while someone hyperfocuses on code? The way they tease each other but genuinely respect their abilities? It’s beautiful.
There are some niche 3D file system browsers/shells out there, but none as captivating as what's shown in the movie (or the linked "animated experience") that I can find.
Not quite filesystem navigation, but SGI IRIX's Performance CoPilot software had an IrixGL (OpenGL's precursor) UI for monitoring things like memory state, CPU/storage loads, etc.
The PCP is absolutely nowhere _near_ the graphical wizardry of the state of this app, and the overlay of executing code atop a given directory structure is quite beautiful (practicality be damned), but I can see the inspiration.
I do wonder if, on a modern Linux system with SELinix, this model (code accessing a directory) is actually closer to viable? SELinux's contexts/labels for subjects overlaying with the same for objects can, I imagine, be visualized. The normal access patterns would be way too overwhelming, I think - but exceptions/policy violations? :ponder:
Nice little blog post that looks at these interfaces in the movie:
https://scifiinterfaces.com/2023/12/11/hackers/
I've flipped that switch for book adaptations.
I let go of fanboying on what Hollywood "did to" the story and instead just decided to be thankful something I love was given a new medium / audience / interpretation... and voila! now I have two things to love.
It's still fun to point out where things could've been done differently, but instead of actually disliking the film(s) because of those things, it's just another mechanism that lets me talk to my friends about something. Much more fun than riding home in silence in any case. ;)
> I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it.
I never managed to reach your third time. Once was enough for me, at the time, to decide it was an awful movie which didn't have anything to do with hackers or computers and which was terribly overacted, and that was that. Filed under yet another "Hollywood just doesn't get it", subsection "so bad it's embarrassing".
Much later I realized I had missed a cult classic. Oh well. I still think it's a bad movie, but I'm ok with other people loving it... maybe that's my growth moment.
"That whole OST is incredible, I still pull orbital and prodigy into my current work playlists."
The best music, in my opinion, in the movie is not on the soundtrack and it is:
Guy Pratt - Combination
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_7N8NsU4jQ
I, too, have such a work playlist entitled "Hack the Mainframe." It's got this type of stuff along with 90s/early 2000s breakbeat songs that ended up shoehorned into car and techno thriller movies at the time. I know a lot of this music was reviled as sellout trash at the time but I was too young to know any better when I first heard it and think it still holds up phenomenally well.
> sellout trash
A trifle offtopic, but.....
In the 1990's and for us Gen-X'ers, the worst thing you could do was to sell out; to take the mans money instead of keeping your integrity. Calling people and bands 'sell outs' (sometimes without justification!) was to insult them.
With the rise of 'influencers' the opposite appears to be the case; people go out of their way to sell out and are praised for doing so. This is a massive change in the cultural landscape which perhaps many born in the 2000's aren't aware of. (Being aware of this helps give some perspective to Gen-X media and films like hackers).
This is exemplified in Wayne's World product scene. I later found out none of the companies shown in the scene had paid for their products to be in the scene. Its also one of the most iconic scenes from the movie.
This is insightful. But I'm not sure it's completely true, I think people just have shifted their perception of what selling out means.
Content creators on YouTube, for example, get criticized when they literally sell their brand to a larger conglomerate. It seems people do not complain if they do sponsorizations tho.
> Content creators
I'd argue the very words creating "content" implies something commercial is already in mind and is a driver, rather than just doing your own thing online and not caring (such showing a video of your band/hobby on YouTube in case anybody is interested).
To a Gen-X'er, the former sounds like they are already a sell out :-)
I certainly agree with you that perceptions have shifted.
I agree with you and I find the term "creating content" awful, even though I'm forced to use it because it's something people immediately understand.
"Content creator"... what happened to artist, playwright, painter, hobbyist, etc? It makes it seem as if they were making stuff for a corporation to sell.
In a sense, society sold out
> 90s/early 2000s breakbeat songs
Can recommend such a mix, too. Gather select works of The Chemical Brothers, The Dust Brothers, Bassbin Twins, Crystal Method, DJ Krush, Dub Pistols, Lunatic Calm, Meat Katie... and you're Somewhen Else during it. Works for commutes/trips, too.
Discovered the Hackers ost on a /mu/ thread. So many bangers.
There's another two soundtracks!
https://www.discogs.com/release/1423591-Various-Hackers%C2%B...
https://www.discogs.com/release/131024-Various-Hackers%C2%B3
Damn dude this hurts. My friend took his own life last year, and Hackers was our absolute favorite movie back in high school. I mean even as late as 2022 we were messaging each other the Hacker manifesto, hack the planet, you know all the good stuff. Sam Singh, you would've loved this man. I miss you homie. hack the planet.
This movie had an unreasonable influence on me as a kid...as cheesy as it is, it still holds up as one of my top ten favorite movies.
The movie is obviously technical garbage but one thing it did well was capture that early hacker counterculture spirit. I think a lot of us can appreciate that for the warm blanket it is and forgive its technical accuracy and story flaws.
> I think a lot of us can appreciate that for the warm blanket it is and forgive its technical accuracy and story flaws.
This is how I feel about it too. I've watched it a good 8-10 times over the decades and enjoy it every time.
I find this and Starship Troopers to fit in a similar niche for me. When I first saw them I found them very cringey, horrible, couldn't stand it. Hackers for the reasons being discussed here. ST because of how bastardized it was from the source material.
But over time I grew to love both of them. In both cases I started to appreciate how they weren't trying to be faithful representations, but rather capture a particular ethos in a cheesy & over the top way. And both of them I think hit their mark well in that regard.
Bastardized? It's satire and not at all subtle about it. You can of course argue that it's poorly executed satire, but judging it based on how faithful it is to the source material is rather missing the point.
It's my favorite movie of all time, even though it's one of those movies that I don't expect anyone else to like. It's just a shot of joyful nostalgia right into my veins every time I watch it.
Explorers, the Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix movie from the mid-80s, is my #2 for the same reasons.
Is Explorers the one with the Rollscanhardly joke?
Stand By Me is in my top 5 for the same reasoning. I grew up in very small town out in the boonies where my friends and I would go exploring in the woods/creeks just without finding a body.
Yep that's Explorers!
I was a bit too young for Stand By Me. The subject matter was just too serious for me at that age. But I also grew up in a small town in the country where exploring was a normal thing.
I would meet kids from college that were from much larger towns and they'd complain "I grew up in so-and-so and there's NOTHING for kids to do there!"
I'd think to myself, "you have no idea what you're talking about. I used to go to your town to do stuff!"
+1 for explorers
Last month they had a rerun of the movie at the cinema in Dublin (IE) and went to see it with a friend. It was such a surreal experience because after watching it on my laptop so many times I could hear the laughter and the jokes of the audience on the cheesy hacking scenes, it was like watching the movie in 4D, I enjoyed it a lot!
I even brought my PowerBook Duo 280c along with me
Watching with a big public group of people you mostly don't know but maybe should is a special experience. This may depend on region, but in the US there used to be frequent midnight openings for superfans like myself. People dress up in costumes, local shops hand out prizes and it's an event. Saw Phantom Menace this way, LOTR, Watchmen, and maybe others, but I haven't seen a midnight opening offered in years. Maybe the theater managers are swimming in the pool on the roof.
I couldn't find the garbage file. I'm such a failure, now Davinci is going to overturn all the oil tankers
> Uh, the accounting subdirectory in the Gibson is working really hard.
> We got one person online, the workload is enough for like ten users. I think we've got a hacker.
> Never fear, I is here.
> Out of the way you hapless techno weenie.
> Okay, okay, we need proof that we were here.
Really missed opportunity to place a garbage file in here somewhere!
Love it, what a great throwback, especially with the OST.
In Firefox is there a way to play this without FF popping up the search box on every key press? Maybe there's a way for the JS to override the default FF search functionality?
The animation is cool, but I just wanted to note for Hackers fans and movie nerds that the scenes inside the "Gibson" that this animates were actually done via practical effects.
I really love how kids today are so inundated with 3D CGI that when they see well done practical shots like this and my other go to favorite of the submarines in Hunt For Red October it is immediately assumed as CGI as well. Then again, adults are no less fooled either. The size of the sets is also surprising but makes sense when the size of a film cameras used defined the scales. The HBO intro is another example that makes the rounds.
> it is immediately assumed as CGI
Remember seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, watching Indiana Jones being dragged under a lorry by his whip and thinking "wow, that's a brilliant stunt"?
Remember (or did you forget) seeing the latest Indiana Jones film with a CGI motorbike and a CGI Indiana Jones jumping onto a moving train?
One will always be more impressive than the other.
I think it’s also important to remember that there are tons of terrible practicals out there, we just don’t think of them because they were bad and forgettable. Lots of great CG too that you likely never recognized as CG. Sicario is littered with examples. You’d be hard pressed to call out even most of them.
Even terrible practical effects can be weirdly charming though.
That's true on there being lots of terrible practical effects out there. The parent lauded Raiders of the Lost Ark for its practical effects. In contrast, Last Crusade was a great movie that had a few practical effects that were terrible. The scene with the tank going over the edge of the cliff is so bad and so fake that I could help rewind and pause to laugh at it when I was a kid.
Isn't the very worst aspect of that very scene, the CGI part rather than the practical effects part?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np4OojYGixI
Sure, the tank rolling at the bottom looks a bit like a model, but it isn't nearly as jarring as the part where the shot of the guy in the tank looks like it came from another world entirely and has been badly edited in on top.
It's the guy in the tank that breaks it. Pretty sure it's just a dummy.
The going over the cliff scene is a drop in the bucket to Raiders' melting faces or sticking with Last Crusade's fast aging scene
Some of you tough tech guys are talking a lot of sh$@ but I bet you couldn’t hack a Gibson.
OK who is gonna turn this into a functional terminal emulator for me?
Sadly, looking through the code, doesn't show up any "GARBAGE" file easter egg to be found.
Amazing stuff, nevertheless!
Awhile I made something really dumb: https://www.warpstream.com/etc/terminal you can enter a 'gibson' command.
Thanks, I've been looking for 5 minutes and was about to rewatch the movie to see where it's supposed to be !
I mean, you should totally go and rewatch it, don't let me stop you from enjoying again the movie!
> You're gonna love New York. It's the city that never sleeps.
I highly recommend the 88 films 4k blu-ray release for those who love Hackers. I recently was able to purchase an unopened VHS tape as well. I have a brand new VCR coming so I can have a proper experience.
The proper experience is to copy it onto an old VHS, worn out and a bit stretched in places. Play it for the umpteenth time on a 1980s VCR feeding a fuzzy old tv in the basement for background noise (and a killer sound track) as you beat your head against a crt monitor wondering why your code won't compile.
Bonus points if you pause to watch the movie and wonder "how have I seen this movie countless times and only just now noticed there's a 6th hacker in the 'main' crew?".
I have a couple copies of the laserdiek variants, always felt like the best tech to show homage.
The Gibson! Very cool. did you make this?
I made a Tron lightcycle game: https://new.af/tron
Now that AI accelerates dev so much, I suspect we'll get to see a lot of cool throwbacks.
While we're at it, I remember an atari st game that was like the tron lightcycle as "Trek4".
Did it really exist ?
Hmm I had an ST. I think I vaguely remember this. Was it a PD game or commercial?
Only thing I can remember is a blue 3½ floppy with "trek4" handwritten on it so it must have been "found" by my relative that owned the st at the time.
That runs super smoothly!
Thanks! working on multiplayer now...
This is awesome, and remimds of my favourite fact which is that the jurrasic park unix system was actually a real unix system running a real file browser. File browsers ended up converging om a more useful, but way less cool design[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer
Hack the Planet!
It's in the place I put the thing that one time!
They’re trashing our rights!
They're trashing!!
Hack the planet!
The addressing on that hex dump is all over the place.. and not even byte-aligned!
Oh dang I made it to the end of the grid/world. Got scared in the darkness and retreated back to the light.
This is great, is there any way to just have it fly around autonomously?
You have now become The Plague.
Phenomenal work!
Easily my biggest guilty pleasure movie, warts and all, I still love it.
This is really slow for me on my laptop. Does it need a P6 to run? I heard those have a killer refresh rate.
You need to run it on a RISC architecture, but that would be too much machine for you.
It may or may not change everything.
only if you have a 28.8 bps [sic] modem!
Yeah. RISC is good.
I grew up hacking in the 1980s and I watched this movie and I totally hated it. Me and the hackers around me were more like War Games, but with skateboards and BMX bikes. On our best days, I likened us to the characters in the movie Sneakers, but no way, they were far more elite than us.
Then this Hackers movie came out and it seemed like a laughable clown caricature of hacker culture. It was insulting, like I imagine Big Bang Theory is to many.
Then I went to the Bay Area, and hung out at places like New Hack City and 2600 meetings, and I loved those people and the movie made more sense:
- War Games was a movie for 1980s hackers.
- Hackers was a movie about 1990s hackers.
So I re-watched the movie. I still hated it. But, I get it.
And no, I've no idea which movies are a similar anthem for 2000s/2010s hackers. Let me know.
The writer of Hackers, Rafael Moreu, went to New York 2600 meetings and talked to various members of MoD (a hacker group which had a book written about them by a local New York reporter, Joshua Quittner, who later worked for Wired and then Time/Pathfinder if anyone remembers that).
The names and handles of the movie reflect this - Cereal Killer, Plague, Joey, Razor - all handles of local New York people. Phreak in a sense too. Some of the kids went to Stuyvesant high school, where scenes were filmed. The kid getting raided in his shower happened locally. The plant worker almost getting shot by a flare gun held by people trashing happened locally. As did other things.
Some other national things made it in, like the Hacker's manifesto written by an LoD member.
Some things were invented for the movie. There was no attractive 19 year old Angelina Jolie type hacking along with the boys as shown in the movie. These guys were not rollerblading through Manhattan together. There was no Cyberdelia nightclub everyone hung out at, although some of the guys might have gone together once in a while to the nightclubs popular at the time (The Tunnel /Limelight / Palladium / Club USA / Webster Hall).
LoD and MoD's heydays were more in the 1980s. By the first year or two of the 1990s, both were pretty much defunct, if my memory serves.
I was acquainted with several members of both groups, and I don't remember them really resembling the Hackers movies in appearance or personality. But I lost touch with them in about 1989-1990 or so, due to the next phase of my life kicking off.
I haven't watched it, but I seem to recall "Mr Robot" was widely praised by techies too.
Yes! Forgot about Mr Robot, which was absolutely fantastic.
If you like wargames and hackers, you might wanna check out Colossus. There's Halt and Catch Fire too though it's a TV show.
There's a list of similar films at the bottom of https://telehack.com/telehack.html
I never saw this movie back in the day, but now I want to.
Just listening to Halcyon & On & On is putting a lump in my chest. That era in time was just so fantastic and I don't think it's just because I was 21 and utopian.
I think I could perma stay in 1995/96, Groundhog Day style. Just relive those same "halcyon" days over and over perfecting and absorbing everything over and over.
"We have to go back!"
This is really cool! Thanks for making and sharing.
A+ app, I turned on sound and was not disappointed.
Love the movie, got a spray can and sprayed my whole keyboard army green after watching it then realized I can't 10 finger type. What a golden age of interesting young people in computer security. Roughly one year later (iirc), I read "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" which might have been my most influential IT related read. It's probably tied with "Man-Computer Symbiosis" :)
very cool. i made my own version of the final wargames sequence. now, whenever i am in a boring meeting i am adding something to the game mechanics.
This absolutely made my week! (I still have the Hackers movie poster framed in my office.)
That's delightful - thanks for sharing!
Undoubtedly a film that inspired a generation.
Yeah! Hack the Planet :D
I like Wargames much more. Still, people is right that we should take the 'hacking' (cracking) scenes artistically, as a metaphor on what's happening inside the mind of a cracker.
wonderful
This is good progress but the 1995 movie is still superior.
There many details in the movie, like the sound of electricity going through the circuit, the camera path is more like a spline with rotations in more axis, etc.
It does perform really good on mobile.
Now add a flashing red box with:
/root/.workspace/garbage
(was that it?) and a VJ mode that scrolls around to the beat and you have something for the next party!
LOVELY :D
"RISC architecture is gonna change everything." :)
Easily the most quoted part of the film, aside from “Hack the planet!!!!” … but also an amazing prediction! All the devices in our pockets are RISC machines. That did change everything.
I was going for the books initially, but isn't as much fun.
Regarding RISC, kind of, there have been compromises in the instruction sets.
"Okay, we need proof that we were here... right uh... Okay, yeah, Garbage, gimme Garbage."
My wife and I both love this movie. I thought it was cheesy and unrealistic when it dropped, but it's reflective of a mid-90s era when technology was something to be excited about and there was a lot of hype about "cyberspace" and such nonsense. That's also when I got into internetworking, Linux, and all that stuff. And electronic music. Hackers made people with my interests seem way cooler and sexier than we really were.
As far as 90's cyber films go it was probably The Net that had the most realistic vision of the future. Workin from home, ordering pizza.
I realized the other day that Hackers doesn't really have a depiction of the social milieu of the elite hacker—the BBS. But The Net kinda does. So, point to The Net.
I love it. Hack the planet. Thank you so much.
Ironically aestheticically wise the best hackers (as in the original sense) would just depict a half busy and utterly boring plan9/9front desktop and tons of physical (and digital books). Forget about ricing (except for constrast and readability, such as using Zukitre instead of Adwaita for GTK). Usability first.