I’ll have to keep an eye for that. Given the shows early history with the Amiga and Newtek’s Video Toaster I can’t say I’m at all surprised… never spotted it before though.
awesome…i just broke into the XXXXXXXXXXX!
you mean he didn’t perform an antigular cardioplasty and shunt the left venticular ailoarta?
my favorite is when a character is poisoned with some incredibly deadly poison and all their systems are shutting down and they drink an “antidote” at the last second before dying and suddenly are 100% okay, like no damage occurred. Or the hero who can barely walk after being shot and beat up is suddenly back to full force after pouring some high proof alcohol into the wound and applying a gauze patch. tada. 
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Ever since I was a kid, the go-to girly magazine was “Playpen” in sit-coms, dramas, and movies.
It’s much worse than that. Practically every significant character is named after a number in one of a dozen different languages, and the five major male characters are named One, Two, Three, Four and Five in order of appearance.
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As a programmer, I really can’t muster the energy to be offended that they don’t choose to hire an actual coder to write actual working doomsday-device code so they can display 25 lines of it for half a second. I also wouldn’t be bothered if pausing and zooming in on the hilt of the sword of a background character in a fantasy epic showed reflection patterns proving that the pommel gem was plastic.
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Well sure, but maybe that doomsday device’s code can be in something other than HTML. And maybe it could stop scrolling up (or down) the screen for no reason.
I’d like to point out a scene in The Newsroom that did a fairly good job. One of the characters is trying to come up with a story on trolls by getting into a trolling community. They show him on a laptop that’s clearly made by Apple, but the desktop looks like Windows when they show him typing in some kind of chat room. Then they go to a wider shot, showing his whole screen and it’s obvious he’s running Windows in a window on OSX (I assume using Parallels). Something that a smart investigative journalist actually would do to avoid exposing his actual machine to the trolls and to make sure he’s always going through a VPN instead of coming from an IP owned by a news organization.
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As I’ve said in other threads: This is really no worse – and sometimes a hell of a lot better – than how they depict other professional skills. If you’re critiquing a film on this level, either (a) it was excellent and you’re nitpicking, or (b) it was awful and you’re desperately looking for something to hold your attention.
Could they do better with a tiny bit more effort? Sure. Is it worth the cumulative investment, when you consider that everyone else would ask them to do better in their areas of experience? Maybe not.
My life’s ambition is to invent something that can legitimately be given the acronym PLOT, so I can take credit for the first real world PLOT Device.
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I can’t provide a single scene that nails it, but I would suggest Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull). That there is no one clear example might be indicative of the approach here. The characters here are hacking into systems because they have goals, not to create a fancy scene for you.
Screens are in colour (not likely par for the time, but what the heck), but other than that, they tend to the functional. As for the “looking up passwords”, those scenes suggest to me (interpretation here!) that Brace was jumping into a memory monitor, and knew where to go hunting for plaintext passwords in memory. But there was no need to explain this, because that’s not what actual people do. (That’s not smart security, but it was likely common in custom built research systems of the time.)
Two key things seem likely here: first, everything looks like it was custom created based on script/plot requirements. Given that the movie’s core is about a technological development, that’s likely smart. The second part is that this may owe a lot to Trumbull - not surprising, when you note that he has key technical roles in 2001, Andromeda Strain, Silent Running, Star Trek:TMP, and Blade Runner. He was in the driver’s seat for Brainstorm, and he was someone who knew what real systems looked like and how they worked. Trumbull may also have been aware that creating believable plot-linked techno screens is comparatively cheap, one of the most annoying factors in bad re-use. The Terminator could have been seeing something other than 6502 machine code – almost anyone with a bit of imagination and technical bent could have created something unique in about twenty minutes.
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Why does the porridge bird lay its eggs in the air?
READ UNHAPPY MACNAM UNHAPPY MACNAM SYSTAT UPTIME NINE OH ONE
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I had a similar reaction to the wget-based script they showed at the beginning of the movie that was used to scrape all the photos off of some Harvard website for the first iteration of The Face Book.
Not computer code and not a movie, but the Big Bang Theory goes to some effort to get its science (mostly) right.
There was also an episode of Nikita (the 90s TV version) where they kill -9 a process to save the day.
There’s a relatively famous moment in Godzilla 2000 (the Japanese movie) in which a monitor clearly depicts a list of games supported by a particular version of the MAME emulator, for no particularly good reason.
On a related note, not only has it been determined that Avengers briefly depicted the MSX port of Galaga, but it actually appears to be from someone’s particular Youtube video:
http://www.msx.org/forum/msx-talk/general-discussion/msx-avengers-movie?page=1
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Antitrust with Tim Robbins was a terrible movie, but the stuff that people did on computers was vaguely believable. My memory was that they hired Miguel Icaza to consult on the movie.
Kind of overkill for a grade-c thriller.
Overkill? Perhaps grade-A movie makers should consult with people who Know f what they speak, more often.
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