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!

Who hadn't?

I was a young adult back then, but the sense of adventure in the movie brought my memories of BBSs and creative misuse of telephone lines, X.400 networks, and dial-out modems. Fun times.

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.

I was also so inspired by this Gibson supercomputer interface when I created my little game prototype for js13k games contest 10 years ago:

https://invadium.itch.io/cybergrid-13

Now I think I should've used flight mechanics like in flight simulators instead of walking, but the cyberspace and viruses are still there. Maybe I will refresh it one day to give a more Hacker-like ambient flight feeling.

My people.

https://scifiinterfaces.com/2023/12/11/hackers/

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 think the movie is wildly overrated just as a piece of storytelling; the hacker fan-service in it is just fine, they clearly got some tfile kids to consult with the script.)

Not familiar with that term, and my googling has failed. What does it refer to?

people familiar with the culture

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 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.

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

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).

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.

"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.

Note it's not even relevant whether something is commercial. Art can be commercial and not be just "content". A musician is not a "content creator" which happens to create content in the shape of music. "Content" implies it doesn't really matters, what matters is engagement and the platform (and advertisers, etc). It's not healthy to think of hobbies, art, and entertainment as exclusively about this. Imagine if Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, Alan Moore, etc had been thought of merely as "content creators".

This is not a new idea. Stallman was already pushing back against this "content" term decades ago.

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.

https://www.discogs.com/release/1423591-Various-Hackers%C2%B...

https://www.discogs.com/release/131024-Various-Hackers%C2%B3

https://www.discogs.com/release/29127-Various-Hackers-Origin...

I love this so much, thank you for sharing!

* Slow down the motion to about .5 of what it is currently, with easing/acceleration on the speed to emulate the camera dolly and jib effects used in the film

* Add a random motion setting that allows me to run it full screen just sliding through the aisles, banking around turns, flying up and then back down the aisles.

* optionally lock the framerate to 24fps to give it a film feel

* optional shaders on the main viewport to emulate lens distortion, film grain, etc

* raytracing with reflectivity on the glass, refraction, diffusion, etc.

"This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...

after all, we're all alike.

> We got one person online, the workload is enough for like ten users. I think we've got a hacker.

> Out of the way you hapless techno weenie.

Really missed opportunity to place a garbage file in here somewhere!

"Cyberspace […] A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding." – Neuromancer

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.

Like, there's not that much to the book. It's a decently written "joins the military" story with a couple of well developed characters and one unique idea about sci-fi warfare (the suits spending most of their time jumping, which in retrospect would just make you a giant target...)

None of this is bad, it's just like, there's dozens of other mil-sci-fi books and yet everyone has to jump in and go "but the book is better!!!"

When I first saw Starship Troopers, I disliked it because it wasn't faithful to the book. Over time I came to appreciate it for what it actually was, and now think it is fantastic.

Likewise, with Hackers I initially disliked it due to how inaccurate and unrealistic it was. I came to appreciate it for what it actually was over time, and now think it is fantastic.

  > I think you're the one who missed the point

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.

Explorers, the Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix movie from the mid-80s, is my #2 for the same reasons.

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!"

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.

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.

Amazing stuff, nevertheless!

I even brought my PowerBook Duo 280c along with me

[0] https://hackerscurator.com

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?

"Search for text when you start typing"

I have to say, I do like this setting enabled, but can see how it conflicts with the page. And let's be fair, how much time and I saving over having to press Ctrl+F when I want to search a page?

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.

Then where's the massive explosion of software?

Did it really exist ?

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?".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer

My ankles don't.

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 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.

There's a list of similar films at the bottom of https://telehack.com/telehack.html

This brings back _memories_! I think I won't even stand out from the crowd here mentioning me and the gang watched the hell out of the VHS back when, in our circle it was a different world than I suppose even for people in the West who loved it. We're so far removed this became a cult classic long before it became cult classic everywhere else. Needless to say, Angelina Jolie's character made quite an impression on this young mind :-) Damn, quotes from this movie live rent-free in my head. I was already quite a fan of Orbital when I saw Hackers for the first time. It was also at the end of "Mortal Kombat", by the way -- but Hackers used it marginally better still IMO.

Hacker had HEART, man. It was cheesy but the feeling it left in an entire sub-culture of a generation, cannot be underestimated. I am reading some of the other stories here, and it brings smile to my face knowing me and my gang weren't the only ones the movie imprinted on.

Woha, this isn't woodshop class?!

As in train station hacking scene

2. Monitor inside the glasses. was it real?

They didn't have accelerometers, so it was just a dumb screen on your face.

Would be nice to get one from Johnny Mnemonic too.

Undoubtedly a film that inspired a generation.

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" :)

Me also: yah RISC is good!

Regarding RISC, kind of, there have been compromises in the instruction sets.

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.

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!"

It’s like prog rock. By and large, hot chicks are interested in bands like Motley Crue and Bon Jovi.

But prog rock never got chicks wet. It was always music by nerds for other nerds.

I think a realistic movie about hacking would be the same. By and large.

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.

/root/.workspace/garbage

(was that it?) and a VJ mode that scrolls around to the beat and you have something for the next party!