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Tell HN: WarGames (1983) is mind-blowing

64 points by sidcool ↗ HN
I can't believe I hadn'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.

63 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] thread
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. :)
sidcool
Well I was born the same year the movie was released.
jacobush
That makes you part of the VHS generation, so that counts.
Zork212
I agree it's the hipster thing to do. Also if partaking in popcorn do the jiffy pop on the stovetop.
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.
EvanAnderson
A VHS filter for VLC would be a lot of fun for just this kind of thing!
dfansteel
It's not a hacker film, but if you're looking for something in a similar style I recommend "Cloak & Dagger".
sidcool
Thanks. It's midnight and I feel 10 years younger. Going to watch that now.
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...

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.
gm-conspiracy
I do like the film, but it was a bit heavy for me as a youngster (the murder part).

Stressful, like The Secret of Nimh.

jasonkostempski
Just finished it, definitely worth the watch. Not sure how I never caught the movie growing up. That must have been one of Louie Anderson's first roles :)

Edit: According to IMDb, it was!

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.

ChuckMcM
There are two ways to consider this question, hacking as in "Mr. Robot" or hacking as in writing code for the joy of creation and discovery. Given the reference to 'writing software for corporations' I'll consider it the latter.

It is profoundly important for engineers to periodically rekindle their sense of wonder if they wish to stay relevant and it sounds like what you are asking, if so that is super awesome.

Unfortunately for different people it is different things. So you might have to flail around and try a few things first before you get where you want to be. The good news is that it has never been as easy to try different computing things as it is today.

One piece of advice though is to be mindful of tooling. Which is to say think about the tools you use and if they help or hinder your wonder. Nothing puts the kabosh on wonder like slogging through a click and type interface for an hour for each attempt at making progress. So think about tools as well as what you're using those tools for. Perhaps take a week to try different ways of editing source code for example to find one that is the most frictionless.

Finally, before we get to some suggestions, YOU MUST change how you 'score' your progress internally. On thing I have seen again and again is people who have been coding professionally for a while their 'score' is "projects completed in unit time" the bigger the number the better they feel, that was how their boss scored them and they adopted it for their own use. There are learning curves on things and if you score your self by completions you will become disillusioned. But if you can allow yourself to adopt a score of 'interesting things learned' over unit time, then you will be much more likely to be successful. Trust me learning that you don't like functional programming is just as important as successfully blinking an LED on a demo board.

Here are some things which have helped me or people I know.

Raspberry Pis - It is a very inexpensive computer that people look at for teaching but it is also a great little server and can run everything the "big" internet servers tend to run so if you wonder about how email systems, dns, and web servers interact? Or ways to build a "server farm" of multiple machines? You can experiment with your own "server farm" which sits on a couple of dinner plates rather than a noisy 19" rack in your basement.

Machine learning - there are lots of interesting courses online for free and a ton of data you can use to train algorithms. Building a small Neural Net is easy[1] and can trigger a lot of wonder.

Arduinos/Embedded systems - have gotten much more approachable and nothing says fun like having your hat respond when someone says something around you :-). I love going to Maker Faire and just basking in all the creativity of imaginative ways people have applied computation to problems that don't need it.

Software defined radios - the idea of writing code which becomes decoded data at the output is quite fascinating to me and I've been having a lot of fun with it lately.

[1] http://www.wildml.com/2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-...

mjevans
Try out a new language and see how it feels. If you like it, you've added another tool to your belt. If you don't, now you know that /you/ should avoid using that tool.

Go (Google) has been on my list of languages to try for a while, I should use it in a project this weekend...

TYPE_FASTER
Working on robotics software and learning new to me concepts like control loops was pretty fun.
Apocryphon
Sneakers is also great. Check that out.
sidcool
On my bucket list. Thanks.
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

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.

sidcool
I haven't read the book, but the movie is so good, I don't want to degrade the afterglow.
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.
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...

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)
EvanAnderson
I really enjoyed The Cuckoo's Egg book, and later the video adaption for NOVA.

Cliff Stoll is a really interesting guy. If you haven't seen it, check out his Acme Klein Bottle site. It's delightful. http://www.kleinbottle.com/

gm-conspiracy
Also The Manhattan Project and Sneakers.
EvanAnderson
Came here to mention The Manhattan Project, too (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.
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.

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...
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.

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.

excalibur
Sort of like the computer animation of the Death Star coming into range of the Rebel base at the end of Ep IV. It's supposed to be counting down for 15 minutes, but it's clear that the animation is only 15 seconds long.
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.

dmichulke
I think it would work if you see it as a timing based attack that measures how fast the response comes back.

This would explain both the "progress bar" as well as the approx. constant time per digit.

clamprecht
I wrote ToneLoc because of this movie! It changed my life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToneLoc

bnferguson
Ha! I totally used ToneLoc. Found all sorts of interesting systems in my small town. But the most memorable was my science teacher asking me why I called her at 3AM (I had disabled caller id blocking to save a bit of time that night).

Whoops.

Probably still have a floppy with it in storage somewhere. :D Thanks for making that!

dsiegel2275
I too remember using ToneLoc a few times in the mid nineties.

Thanks!

"I might be an adult, but I'm a minor at heart"

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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.
evilpete
I used ToneLoc a lot in the 90's :-)
baldfat
You seriously might have help put my two friends in jail in the 80s. They lived in Virginia and they ended up finding a server at the Pentagon. They lost all their computers and weren't allow to use a computer till they arrived in college.
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...

   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.
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.

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."

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.