Cloudy with a chance of Wargames

[altivo]

Gary's birthday. I got him a new camera and some audiobooks, we went out for lunch and stopped in two pet stores to get some small aquarium stuff we needed.

This evening we watched Wargames, one of the films we saw together when we were first dating. I wanted to see it again because someone had insisted there was a Radio Shack computer in it. There wasn't. Many of the special effect computer activities were controlled by an Apple II, though. The home computer that the main character used to break into NORAD was an IMSAI CP/M system, S-100 bus, very expensive at the time but his family did seem to have money. Amusingly, the program he used to dial phone numbers in sequence to find the ones with computer modems on them did exist. I saw something very much like it back in that time period. ;p

So, bedtime. Oh, and no rain today, though they kept telling us it was imminent.

Comments

[altivo]

GUIs are very costly in terms of efficiency and security, absolutely. I shudder to think of all the security issues that have probably been added on top by the "smart-phone" interfaces now.

Watching Android users make "gestures" at their touch screens makes me think of the StarTrek interface to computers. Didn't make sense then, doesn't make sense now. I still prefer a keyboard, even if Scotty did call it "quaint."

The most bullet-proof systems with which I have experience are OpenVMS and the old IBM MVS. OpenVMS does have a GUI now, but it's very basic Motif and gets sneers from the big GUI users.

As for Wargames, it was pretty hokey in some respects, particularly the security (or lack thereof) for the computers. When the film was new a friend of ours declared that the WOPR sure had a "unit record" look about it, and he was right. Even in 1983 computers didn't look like that any more. The thing looked more like a glorified card sorter from 1960 than a state of the art device for artificial intelligence even in 1983. The added commentary from the original directors and actors was good. We had no idea in 1983 that the WOPR's panels of flickering lights were being controlled by an Apple II computer, operated by a person who was sitting inside it for example.

In 1983 I was already established in a mainframe career path and on a track out of application programming into systems. Rather than influencing me, the film amused me with its inaccuracies. Broderick was cute but a punk who deserved the scare he got.

We enjoyed Tron much more in that era because the writers managed to work a lot of computer realities into the script in spite of the ridiculous costumes and fantasy setting.