
Tell HN: WarGames (1983) is mind-blowing - sidcool
I can&#x27;t believe I hadn&#x27;t watched this movie till now.  It just blew my mind.  Being a hacker, tinkering, solving problems was the dream I ever imagined doing.  This just rekindled my dying spirit of hacking.  Just wanted to share my exhilaration.
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clamprecht
I wrote ToneLoc because of this movie! It changed my life.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToneLoc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToneLoc)

~~~
bifrost
TBH its still the best out there! I know people who did all of 415/510/408 and
kept fresh .dat files flowing on BBSes for years.

Using ToneLoc is how I got into optimizing modem strings, which got me my
first job installing modems for Dial ISPs in the 90s. If you lived in the SFBA
I probably made your dial experience better because of it!

~~~
clamprecht
Cool! I think the setting I used was "ATS11=45", which made it dial faster.
Any faster than that and my switching station couldn't handle it sometimes.

------
baldfat
I was a very young hacker. In 1982 I paid $300 ($300.00 in 1982 had the same
buying power as $770.53 in 2017) I got a 300 baud modem for my C64. I started
on the BBS and then I ended up with multiple garbage bags of floppy disk of
pirated software. I learned a lot from the phreakers and learned to built more
hardware, RAM Disk etc...

One of my friends (two brothers) got arrested in 1983 when they accidentally
tried to enter a Pentagon server. They called me and were so scared. The FBI
took everything they owned and they ended up not going to jail but no
computer's till they went to college.

Then "Capt. Kirk" who was 17 and lived in my town was buying illegal goods
through credit card carbon copies. He would steal the carbons from stores
trash cans (People only ripped them once. He says he did over $30,000 in goods
when he got caught, he was charged with about $6,000. He ended up with a job
at Compuserve on their security team.

Personally I got a few "pen tester" jobs through my Uncle and just worried
about the trading of games with my software alliance with friends in UK and
the Northeast. I never bought illegal goods and never spammed a area code
again by the time I was 15 I was done with the darker side of hackers. My main
hacks were assembly hacking the games security back then. Eagle Soft were the
kings and I was a little kid that tried hard.

Watching the movie was painful in the movie theater. I knew the technology was
not there and thought it was just not possible. I was a jaded Hacker in my
young teens who preferred Isaac Asimov books.

------
bitwize
Seeing _WarGames_ again decades after my first viewing gave me a raging
cinema-boner. The tropes we associate with "Hollywood hacking" are only
sparingly used; instead, David Lightman takes a more pragmatic approach. When
David wants to find a backdoor into WOPR, there's no furious keyboard banging,
no VR-esque visuals of circuits or cyberspace tunnels. Instead, David goes to
the library and _looks up Falken in the card catalog_ , compiling books and
microfiched magazine articles by/about him.

And of course were it not for _WarGames_ Broderick wouldn't have been Ferris
Bueller. In fact in _WarGames_ Broderick plays a more credible teenager: a
clever but naïve kid always looking to have fun, rather than Bueller's
manipulative mastermind character type.

------
daverobbins1
While I too enjoyed this film in my formative days, the book "The Cuckoo's
Egg" really blew my mind when I read it back in 2005. If you are a fan of
Wargames you would love this book.

Admittedly it's a bit dated now but it holds the same nostalgia that Wargames
does.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416507787/ref=x_gr_w_glid...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416507787/ref=x_gr_w_glide_bb_sout?ie=UTF8&tag=x_gr_w_glide_bb_sout-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1416507787&SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2)

~~~
yodon
+1 for the Cuckoo's Egg. It takes place a bit after the war-dialing era of
Wargames and is factual rather than fiction but it's a great read and the real
deal of network intrusions, hacking, and spies in the 80's (I met Cliff Stoll
shortly after the main events of the book and we spent much of the next five
years hanging out together after meeting in a phone networking distribution
closet at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, but that's a
different story)

------
mrspeaker
I totally agree: I re-watch this movie every year. My favourite part of the
movie is when he is talking to the two older hackers and one says to the other
"Do you remember when you asked me to tell you when you were acting rudely and
insensitively? Well, you're doing it right now."... just made things feel so
real.

~~~
sidcool
You are right. It highlights the lack of social skills in nerds. I feel
however that it's a stereotype.

------
Apocryphon
Sneakers is also great. Check that out.

~~~
joshstrange
Anytime voice recognition is brought up all I can think of is "My voice is my
passport. Verify me" [0] and what it took for them to get those words haha. I
can't seem to find the video of it right now but I'll never forget the
(paraphrasing) "You know what word I really want to hear you say? Passport".

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5GzlOpf3KA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5GzlOpf3KA)

~~~
mjevans
They probably could have gotten close enough by stringing together "pass" and
"port" which would be much easier to get.

If they still actually needed /passport/ as a word talking about if you need
one or not to go to another country (EG Mexico or Canada) would have been
enough.

Still, the writers got things correct FAR more often than not. Sneakers is a
good introduction to hacking and security concerns.

------
dfansteel
It's not a hacker film, but if you're looking for something in a similar style
I recommend "Cloak & Dagger".

~~~
jasonkostempski
Never saw that as a kid but I bought this DVD[1] last summer for $5 at WalMart
just for The Wizard. Gonna check it out now (right after I re-watch Ghost Dad)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Family-Favorites-Collection-Henry-
Tho...](https://www.amazon.com/Family-Favorites-Collection-Henry-
Thomas/dp/B00AMDA2O4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1488566064&sr=8-1&keywords=the+wizard+dvd+family+favorites)

~~~
programbreeding
The Wizard is the best full feature advertisement ever made.

I'm making a joke but it actually is really good. I have re-watched it as an
adult and I still loved it, but it feels like the type of movie that wouldn't
be good if you didn't have the nostalgia factor.

~~~
jasonkostempski
The parts I liked as a kid didn't really give me the nostalgia I expected (the
reason I bought it), but I did realize the plot is sad as hell. I got the sad
parts as a kid, but they definitely hit way harder watching it as an adult.

------
esw
I saw it in the theater as a BBS-addicted kid, and I remember being just
completely blown away by his setup. I'd never seen an 8 inch floppy before.
Here's a rundown of his gear, for anyone who's interested:
[https://www.quora.com/In-the-movie-War-Games-what-is-this-
pi...](https://www.quora.com/In-the-movie-War-Games-what-is-this-piece-of-
equipment-that-Matthew-Brodericks-character-has-next-to-his-home-computer)

~~~
Turing_Machine
I saw it in a theater about 2 miles away from Elmendorf Air Force Base in
Alaska (then as now one of the first targets that would get blown off the map
in a nuclear exchange).

The wave of nervous laughter that went through the auditorium when Elmendorf
got "nuked" was memorable.

------
ttoinou
Here is a nice review of this movie, showing its symmetry / palindromic
feature (there is a turning point right in the middle off it, and the movie
plot kinda reverses itself till the end) :
[https://dejareviewer.com/2015/08/12/shall-we-play-a-game-
let...](https://dejareviewer.com/2015/08/12/shall-we-play-a-game-lets-see-how-
symmetrical-wargames-is/)

    
    
       In a movie full of brilliant ideas, I think WarGames’ use of Tic-Tac-Toe
       as a metaphor for the futility of a nuclear war is its best. When equally matched powers
       with mutually assured destruction meet, “The only winning move is not to play.”
       
       By setting up the movie’s story in a way that is perfectly symmetrical,
       the filmmakers have done something incredible where they highlight the themes of equally 
       matched opponents, the importance of fighting to survive rather than giving up on humanity,
       cherishing life even in the face of tragic death, and more.
      
      Its technology may be dated, but WarGames will remain a relevant film as long
      as the fear of catastrophic war and intelligent machines is with us.
       What a “strange game,” indeed.

------
dano
And so many great quotes:

Could someone tell me please who first suggested the idea of reproduction
without sex?

Mister Potato Head! Mister Potato Head! Back doors are not secrets!

He wasn't very old. No, he was pretty old. He was 41. Oh yeah? Oh, that's old.

Goddammit, I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it'd do any good!

Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the
conclusion that your new defense system sucks.

This film came out when I was a Sr. in college. My friends and I watched it
several times. Access to the ARPAnet through the AMES TIP made it all so
visceral.

------
dualogy
> _This just rekindled my dying spirit of hacking._

I've observed over the years it's pretty weird the sorts of things that can
effect such "rekindling"! We should collect them all in a thread. For me, at
various points it was:

\- Golang

\- Haskell

\- Sublime Text, coming from VS (as I said.. weird! =)

\- Replaying old-school games!

\- Learning GLSL, hacking together shadertoy.com-like ray(sphere)traced
experiences (though locally)

\- Linux especially all the funny little programs in whatever "AppStore-ish
sort-of-clone" each distro has (all the little maths/graphics/dev/tweak tools,
educational games etc)

\- most amusingly, 4chan /g/ \--- the infantile flair takes me back in spirit
to my earliest coding days (aka I was a teen coding and joking and smoking
with likeminded buddies all day & night after or during school etc)

Wonder what'll be next =) I guess most devs will do well to occasionally seek
out a fresh rekindling, whenever they spent just too much time merely
integrating their stuff with the various loose ends of "the whole (rest of
the) real world" (formats, conversions, inane feature requrests, OS interop,
compatibility adjustments across stack, lib interop, other APIs, threading,
misc IO) .. all the uninteresting-yet-error-prone-and-finicky stuff that
modern development is saddled with (as opposed to old-school "whip up
TurboPascal/QuickBasic, write the LoB app based on CSV, compile, go home"
workflows)

~~~
sidcool
This is a great tip. Thanks.

------
Zork212
Now I'm going to have to watch the movie this weekend as a flood of memories
of my childhood have come back (on how much I enjoyed it in 1983...)

~~~
sidcool
It's nostalgic. The War room is as good as the one from Dr. Strangelove.

------
jacobush
I hear you. If you are old enough to remember, now go watch it on VHS. :) Dub
it to a VHS tape if you have to. :)

~~~
metaobject
And then track down a Sony Betamax player and transfer the VHS tape to Beta
and watch it like that until the tape degrades and ends up unwinding inside
the machine and you have to take the machine apart to detangle the mess from
the record/playback heads.

~~~
jacobush
Sounds like a party!

------
sharemywin
I can remember looking through computer magazines copying code into my TI/4A
around that time. Even though I had to convert it from C64 code. Damn PEEK and
POKE....

~~~
sbuttgereit
:-)

I had a C-64 back then... and a Vic-20 before that. I have to say, that as
much as it was a pain then, today I'm glad I had to use PEEK/POKE. I had to
learn a lot more about fundamental logic in doing things like graphics than
some of my friends that had BASICs where all you had to do was, say, CIRCLE
with coords and a radius. I think it made me a better professional much later
because I knew how lower level logic worked.

~~~
sharemywin
TI/4A didn't have it or an equivalent. so every time I came across it in a
program I was screwed. Which pretty much meant anything cool.

------
sidcool
I have a follow up question. How do I get back into the art of hacking after
years of writing software for corporations? The landscape is very different
today.

~~~
dfansteel
Tie one arm behind your back.

Try to do the stuff you've been doing but without the resources that have been
at your disposal. Build a simple Twitter clone API using only C APIs. Roll
your own HTML layout renderer in Open GL. What if NGINX and Apache didn't
exist? What would you do then?

Watch "Halt and Catch Fire" as an engineer. Listen to the problems they're
solving and try to solve them yourself.

At the end of the day, hacking is about creative problem solving.

~~~
sidcool
Indeed. The attitude that world is full of interesting problems to solve is
the basis of the hacker mindset.

Thanks for suggesting Halt And Catch Fire. It looks great.

------
shmerl
It also anecdotally was the film that triggered creation of the nasty and
abusive CFAA law:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act)

After watching it, some in Congress panicked, and decided to "address the
issue".

------
bryanlarsen
How does it compare to the book? I read the book but just assumed that
watching the movie would spoil the book, like so many movie adaptations do.

The book didn't really influence my 10 year old self much, though. I read
Steven Levy's Hackers at about the same time, and that's what really got me
started.

~~~
LarryMade2
I read the book back when - it was basically a novelization of the screenplay,
so not all that different. I think the novel ends with Lightman being offered
some TA position at the school as the principal planning on getting some
micros for a class... In the movie it just ends at the war room where Joshua
shops playing.

------
dlinder
WarGames and Real Genius were the regular weekly watch (on VHS!) between my
brother and I growing up. What WarGames is to computer hacking, Real Genius is
to hacking, pranks, and working hard / playing hard.

"It's yet another in a long series of diversions in an attempt to avoid
responsibility."

------
gm-conspiracy
Also The Manhattan Project and Sneakers.

~~~
EvanAnderson
Came here to mention The Manhattan Project, too
([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091472/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091472/)).
I liked Matthew Broderick in later movies, but WarGames and The Manhattan
Project are the roles I remember him best in.

~~~
qbrass
_Goes back in time and stops Matthew Broderick from being in The Manhattan
Project._

------
BerislavLopac
Of course, the obligatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/601/](https://xkcd.com/601/)

------
tasty_freeze
When people talk about movies that have a gaping plot hole, I always bring
this example from War Games. (spoiler follows)

At the end of the movie, WOPR is furiously trying to determine the code to
start global thermonuclear annihilation, or something like that. Everyone in
the control room is panicking, trying to figure out how to stop WOPR. They
keep cutting back to the 8(?) digit display of WOPR trying the codes. The
letters and digits spin at a furious pace .. then the first digit locks in,
while the remaining digits keep spinning. Every 45 seconds or so, another
digit locks in. The amount of time it takes to lock in each digit is more or
less constant. The absurdity of this continues until there is just one digit
left and it is spinning, spinning, spinning, even though there are only 36
(0-9 A-Z) possible values.

~~~
mjevans
While this isn't realistic it's self, it does give a good approximation to
normal people about how far the computer has progressed through the address
space; think of it more like a progress bar which happens to have letters than
an actual representation.

Yes, I say progress bar because I know that if it were actually progressing
through an address space we'd see it 'counting' much differently and not
locking in until the end.

