Interesting Movies for tech geeks

WarGames Official Trailer #1 - Dabney Coleman

WarGames (1983)
This movie is 35 years old, but its premise is as terrifying now as it was then: what if a hacker "accidentally" set off a thermonuclear war? Matthew Broderick is a precocious teen who thinks he's hacking a game developer's database for early access to new titles, but he's actually breaching US military systems. Oops.
Check out what Broderick's character had in his room: an original IMSAI 8080 PC kit with a "massive" 17-inch black-and-white monitor. It talked to other computers over a 1200-baud modem, using an acoustic coupler to connect via an actual desktop phone, since there was no way to plug into it. That was just the stuff to fake the look of a high-tech kid's bedroom in 1983; the graphics for NORAD were all faked using a classic HP 9845C, typically used for science and engineering work, plus an Apple II. (h/t ITWorld for the deets.)

The Social Network (2010)

Perhaps this breaks the "no historical reenactments" rule, but few would probably say this look into the founding of Facebook was to-the-letter accurate (except for the deposition scenes). But what a look it is. As writer Aaron Sorkin put it, this isn't really a story about an invention, it's about "the themes of friendship, loyalty, jealousy, class, and power." This film made it to just about every best-of list that year. All that from 2010, six years after Facebook's debut.

Robot and Frank (2012)

This little indy film from 2012 takes place some undisclosed amount of time in the future, but probably is right about...now. You can see that in the designs they had for not only the phones and tablets, but also in the robot itself, which is based a bit on the Honda ASIMO design for a caretaker robot. Fun fact: the robot in the film, voiced by Peter Sarsgaard, was designed by the same company that makes helmets for Daft Punk.

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