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.

Just a few years later I dropped out of school and started my career, haven't looked back since.

My first boss who gave me my first chance, and my 2nd job through referral, he dropped out of 7th grade to start his own business. He was once interrogated by police, and they had brought in some experts from a big ISP, and these "experts" had no idea what he was talking about. :D

Wild years...

My people.

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

    Lost a lot of my people to drugs and jail
    And suicide cause we do or die
    Thats the way this thing goes with my crew and i
    But i guess that we all keep it moving right
    Terminal eternally but you know that i ain't sick
    Out here idling on my nick
    While i go ahead and do another magic trick

"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.

I went to gemini, picked "cavnas". used this prompt

> There's a famous CG scene in the movie Hackers where they "Hack the Gibson". It shows a bunch of translucnt cubes with glowing edges. The textures on the cubes are live computer text. The camera slowly flyies between the cubes tilting gracfully and it searches for the main one.

> Reproduce this scene in Javascript. Be sure to include each of those features

> 1. live computer text which you can simulate by drawing to a canvas offscreen and uploading to a texture, adding more output as it goes. You can even use "function.toString()" of the code you write as input

> 2. a post processing step so we get a glow

> You can probably use three.js for this

Here's the result.

https://codepen.io/greggman/pen/XJKPBZW

No, it's not as good as the site linked above and it's unlikely it would be. On other hand, it got this far on the first try. Maybe a few more iterations and it could get the stuff you want.

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

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

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

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?".

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).

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

However, Sneakers was also released at around the same time, and that really captured my imagination and had a real lasting impact on my life. Hackers was fun, but Sneakers was aspirational.

Every now and then when the opportunistic situation arises, she'll announce at me: "Crash and Burn".

It is the ideal move of transport! (if cars were less common and hills less steep).

I've got weak ankles from rolling them regularly playing other sports, but the inline boots strap em in nice and tight.

If you need some motivation, or just like to watch some decent skating, check out The Stuttering Skater on YouTube. I'm nowhere near even thinking about being that good, but he's great to watch weaving through NYC traffic.

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

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.

Me also: yah RISC is good!

If you objected to the premise or technical content of the movie, you weren't the intended audience.

Hollywood tried to make a bunch of computer movies at the time and had to figure out how to make things on a computer seem exciting, even though in reality, it's just someone sitting and typing for long periods. The producers decided on 3D mainframes and artistically rendered hacker tools (some macintosh progz at the time were not too far off).

At least at the time, they were up to the task of using some creativity to address the challenges of making a compelling, at least visually if not intellectually, movie set in a place and time with technology that effectively shrinks time and space. Now they simply set all their movies before smartphones existed.