What Movies Got Computers Right?

boxturtleme asks: "There have been several posts recently about how movies have gotten computers, hackers, and other geeky stuff entirely wrong. A while back there was an article on Servers, Hackers, and Code In the Movies and another on Usability [of a GUI] in the Movies. Now we all know that most movies out there that have anything to do with technology get some part of it wildly inaccurate, though it often makes for a fun movie. This brings me to my question: What movies got technology right? This could range from movies about the past that represent it correctly to modern day movies or movies about the future that slashdot readers think present something within the realm of possibility. With all the complaining about bad movies, what movies do Slashdot readers think of as the good ones?"

Comments

Antitrust

[golgotha007]

The movie Antitrust had many things right.

If I remember correctly, it had real gnome desktops, actual C and HTML code and showed *nix command line operation that made sense.

the only one i can think of that i've seen

[no reason to be here]

the only movie i can think of where computers played an important role that got them really close to right is you've got mail.

maybe it's not a "computer movie," per se, but computers were an important plot element, and the use that was made of them was very close to real life.

also, i second someone's earlier mention of office space.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

[KlaymenDK]

I can't believe nobody's mentioned "Pirates of Silicon Valley" (1999) yet ... it's most certainly about computers/computing, and most certainly portrays them accurately. It's not (all) fiction, but then again the original Q doesn't state it has to be.

http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/

That movie, along with the folklore.org site, gives the younger audience as much of a history lesson as can probably be conveyed, about the early history of the current mainstream OSes.

Firewall is nearly prefect

[goombah99]

Firewall did a pretty good job of getting almost exactly computers right. When a hacker is trying consecutive ports they add a rule to the fire wall. They actually invoke the right program from the command line. No uber hacker manages to hack in. And the way they secure the data center is to remove all the terminals and USB ports rather that some miracle sentry machine. The data center is just a pile of Dells in racks, no wierd high tech crap. the bad guys have to get physically inside the data center, trick someone at a remote data center to scroll the file on screen and then copy off what is on the computer screens using a jury rigged camera. Then they laboriously have to use OCR to actually read the cam-scans. It's a little hokey that they could so quickly get some software that would translate the serailezed output of a fax-scanner bar to a scan image, but not too hard to believe it possible--after all faxes do just that plus OCR to boot.

Going beyond computers, My favorite movie for getting the science right is Primer. They really capture how scientist talk about ideas as they develop them. Their initial theories are close but wrong. they use old but servicable test equipment. The time travel actually works too. Really! it's the only movie in which the Time travel does not defy the known laws of physics--they just exgaerate it a bit bit.. (in a nutshell, they borrow the only known method of time travel (which is electron positron pairs splitting from a photon then recombining--a positron can be modeled as an electron going backwards in time) and then suppose that one could do the same with macroscopic thing like a human. Thus to travel backward in time, the subject also has to travel forward in time from the past so that the two timelines can merge.)

Finally, I really like the 13th floor.