WarGames and the Great Hacking Scare of 1983

James W writes "Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the release of WarGames and Christopher Knight has written a retrospective about the film and its impact on popular culture. In addition to discussing how the movie has held up over time, WarGames was responsible for what Knight calls the Great Hacking Scare of 1983. Some examples mentioned are 'one CBS Evening News report at the time that seriously questioned whether parents should allow their children to access the outside world via their personal computers at home. A magazine article suggested that computer modems be 'locked up' just like firearms, to keep them out of the reach of teenagers. I even heard one pundit proclaim that there was no need for regular people to be able to log in to a remote system: that if you need to access your bank account, a friendly teller was just a short drive away. And Bill Gates once declared that the average person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a personal computer, too.'" 2008 is also 25 years after the real-life prevention of a WarGames-style nuclear incident.

old news ...

[hostyle]

if yesterday was the anniversary .. isnt this a bit late?

WarGames and Disillusionment

[nurightshu]

I saw WarGames when I was 5 years old. Later on that year, my father bought us our first computer: an Apple //c. I was incredibly depressed when the computer exhibited neither near-human emotions nor a synthesized English accent.

Hottest nerds ever....

[Izabael_DaJinn]

Matthew Broderick as David Lightman and Val Kilmer as...Christopher Knight...not the one who wrote the retrospective though....

Uhm...not the Peter Brady one either.

Jeeze. Will the real Chris Knight please stand up?

Lies!

[aztektum]

I suppose next you'll try to convince everyone that Al Gore did in fact NOT invent the Internet.

Re:Lies!

[samkass]

No, he did... he just never claimed to have done so [firstmonday.org].

Re:WarGames and Disillusionment

[DocSavage64109]

Good link! I had that cartridge for my C64. Too bad it was pretty much useless -- as no game that I had took advantage of it. I suppose it did at least help teach me to not buy every newfangled gizmo that comes along...

I went to see it with my Girlfriend.

[LWATCDR]

I went to see it with my girlfriend. I had a brand new C64 at home and had just finished my first programing class and was getting ready to start college.
We enjoyed the movie but my girl friend got miffed when the Alley Sheenie's character didn't know what MIRVs where. She also said "Yea right they are going to nuke us in the next few hours and we are going to waste our last few hours trying to swim to the mainland!"
It was a good summer.

Re:Locking up computers

[D Ninja]

If you're spending $5,000 for a modem (or an entire personal computer, for that matter), you're spending far too much.

Re:Movie wasn't that good

[D Ninja]

Everybody knows the way you fry a computer's brain is to ask it to calculate pi to the last digit.

PI has a last digit?!

/brain explodes

I'm still amazed at

[NullProg]

how well this movie still remains relevant today.

- The introverted genius, but under-achieving nerd.
- Does not RTFM, but asks for expert help first in understanding the program.
- Hours of relentless researching to find the flaws (hacks) in the target.
- 3rd party vendor mistakes allow entry point for unwanted intruders.
- Hacker not realizing they are not in the system they think they are.

Best quote ever by a end user:
General Beringer: Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.

Enjoy,

Suspending Disbelief

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

>Like the geek scoring Ally Sheedy.

That's how you know it was a science fiction movie and not a documentary.

I hated that movie

[eric76]

Not for the movie itself, but afterwards, there were so many twerps out there war dialing everything that it wasn't unusual at times to receive two or three calls per night.

Of course, it might not have been like that everywhere. At the time, my office was across the fence from the Johnson Space Center. I suspect that any prefix in that area was considered to be a good target.

We also had several consecutive telephone numbers. When the war dialers hit the first, you could be pretty sure that they were going to hit the rest in turn.

With all the aggravation from the large numbers of calls in the middle of the night, I thought that everyone involved in that movie should be should have been strung up from the nearest tree.

CPE 1704 TKS! I STILL REMEMBER!

[ClioCJS]

CPE 1704 TKS! I refuse to double-check my results with google!

WSMR

[prakslash]

I was a little kid back in the late 80s. Once an older relative of mine who was in college showed me how he had made a computer connection to the Simtel20 FTP site. He downloaded some games for me. The welcome screen of the FTP site said: "Welcome to White Sand Missile Range, Nevada".

I remember being very impressed and proud at the time thinking that someone in my family could hack into a military site! :-)

It made me want to learn computers even more.

Locking up modems

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Don't lock up the modems. Get them out and make minors use them. No broadband for you. Nothing faster than a Hayes 2400 until you turn 21. :-)

Re:Hottest nerds ever....

[morgan_greywolf]

I heard he later drove a talking car.

Re:old news ...

[74nova]

Naw, this is probably just a dupe of the one that was on time yesterday

all the memory you need

[jerry westerby]

"Bill Gates once declared that the average person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a personal computer" Which explains why his bloatware uses all but 640k of any pc onto which it is installed.

Re:Thank God

[BigBlueOx]

You don't use an acoustic modem?? How'd you get on this board?? Sheesh.

And those 8-inch single-sided 160k floppies are *perfect* for storing pr0n! I use mine to store my collection of ASCII-art pictures of Playboy playmates. Drool, drool. You can get a really good selection if you know the right boards to call.

Re:Might as well mention the DEFCON game

[hoggoth]

> I think I'll go home and play some.

Spoiler alert:
The only way to win is to not play the game.

Re:I'm still amazed at

[91degrees]

Hours of relentless researching to find the flaws (hacks) in the target.

Yeah! The only film I've ever seen where we get a hacking montage.

Most hacker movies give us a line like "try the tech with the babble on the jargon". No indication that hacking actually requires work.

Elementary School

[bsDaemon]

I think the year was 1990 or 1991 -- I was about 6 or 7. On a tour of the school library, the librarian made a point of telling us about the modem they had connected to the computer in the library.

I had an old Leading Edge computer at home, running DOS 2.0. I asked if it were possible for someone to dial into the library's computer and erase their overdue fines.

Thus was ended the tour of the library, and the modem was never mentioned again.

Re:I'm still amazed at

[Lurker2288]

Come on, do you really think that quote is better than this one?

Mr. Liggett: All right, Lightman. Can you tell us who first suggested the idea of reproduction without sex?
David: Um...your wife?
Liggett: Get out, Lightman. Get out.

I was there in 1983...

[Sponge Bath]

...and I can tell you the tellers were not that friendly.
ATMs and on-line banking are blissfully free of surly humans wearing disco outfits.

Re:WSMR

[eharvill]

I was a little kid back in the late 80s. Once an older relative of mine who was in college showed me how he had made a computer connection to the Simtel20 FTP site. He downloaded some games for me. The welcome screen of the FTP site said: "Welcome to White Sand Missile Range, Nevada".

I remember being very impressed and proud at the time thinking that someone in my family could hack into a military site! :-)

It made me want to learn computers even more.

LOL, you didn't hack into a military site. White Sands is in New Mexico... :-P

Re:It Was Close

[cheater512]

Pity that they've stopped getting advisers for movies.

The list of movies with factually correct technical details is small.
It was nice that they did it properly for The Matrix though.

Re:It Was Close

[Sloppy]

It is easily the most technically accurate of the hacker films

Maybe if you don't count Tron. They drew the lightcycles and tanks exactly how they really look inside the computer.

Obligatory "WarGames" quote...

[sracer]

"I'd piss on a sparkplug if I'd thought it would do any good." ...which also happens to be President Bush's approach to foreign policy.

Shhhhhh, you damn NERD!

[spun]

You'll scare her away! She's a hot chick who posts on Slashdot. Most of us wouldn't care if she thought that rabbits flying out of her ass let her communicate with Zippy the Pinhead.

Most Unrealistic!

[fm6]

If I was a teenager alone in my room with Ally Sheedy, the computer would get very little attention.

Re:It Was Close

[IAmGarethAdams]

You mean like the old "using a paperclip to short the receiver against the coin slot on a payphone to make a free call trick"?

Hi! It looks like you're trying to make a free call, would you like some assistance?

Re:Stop spreading these myths.

[rbanffy]

No. He didn't.

But I wouldn't be surprised if he did say something along that lines before the PC - because we spent so much time with 8-bit 64K machines. You know... He is not a very good futurologist.

He still insists people will conduct searches by voice recognition. I can almost imagine people whispering to the computers at the office "Paris Hilton Sex Video"...

Re:It Was Close

[Jester99]

No, he's referring to the "look in the drawer in the principal's office where they write down the password for the school mainframe" trick :)

Gee thanks

[Joe U]

Oh fuck you all for making me re-live the hell that was DOS memory managment.

Now I'm going to have those nightmares again.

Re:Most Unrealistic!

[transporter_ii]

You must be new here.

Re:it certainly cost me

[Provocateur]

Not just prison...Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison!