Hacker Cinema
Antitrust
2001 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Peter Howitt
A computer programmer's dream job at a hot Portland-based firm turns nightmarish when he discovers his boss has a secret and ruthless means of dispatching anti-trust problems.
17 positive6 negative3 mixed28 neutralfrom 54 commenters
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75 comments on Hacker News
> Elon Musk confirmed on Tuesday (June 23) that SpaceX will call its planned AI satellite megaconstellation "Starmind".
> The choice should come as no surprise, as it continues the company's long-running stellar naming theme.
Reminds me of the movie "Antitrust". Corporation NURV is the bad guy, led by Gary "I'm not Bill Gates, nor his evil successor, Elon Musk" Winston.
> Winston’s company, which seems a whole lot like Microsoft, is working toward the same goal. In fact, Winston claims his new Synapse global communications system will, and I quote, “link every communications device on the planet.” Too goofy. In order to discourage his competitors, Winston has announced a release date for his new software while it is still being written (details like this are why the company seems a whole lot like Microsoft). [0]
The idea is that a monopolistic "synapse" controls information, IMO.
Say, that sounds familiar.
[0] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/antitrust-2001
The movie Antitrust but on steroids in real life. Also the Crossover white collar sweatshop ended up as trendsetter.
I am reminded of the 2001 movie "Antitrust" in which a fictitious company NURV creates a fictitious product, Synapse, a worldwide media distribution network.
That is all. Cheers.
I can’t speak to the value of the vulnerability as I lack the universal Rolodex of Every Exploit Buyer that is apparently available (nor am I interested in debating this with somebody that admitted they didn’t know anything about the vulnerability, declared it worthless anyway, and then moved the goalposts after a core assumption about it was trivially shown to be wrong. I’m fairly certain at this point these kids could recreate the end of the movie Antitrust and there’d be a thread somewhere with tptacek posting “This isn’t that big of a deal because”).
I just saw that you asked if the article about the server-side exploit was about a server-side exploit. It is. It’s right there in the post.
That's certainly one opinion, and is even right, to some degree. But there's also movies like the Imitation Game about Alan Turing, which is a movie, and not a documentary, but there are also countless documentaries about him. There's no shortage of hagiographies about Steven Jobs, in both book and film and tv miniseries format, along with Pirates of Silicon Valley which includes Microsoft's part. There's a movie about Aaron Swartz (The Internet’s Own Boy). The movie Antitrust(2001) is fictional, but in the same area.
Hackers (1995) is fictional but a cult classic. Freedom Downtime (2001) is about Mitnick and hacking culture. There's smaller documentaries too. There's that one about Wikileaks, that one about Cambridge Analytica. There's books like The Dream Machine (Mitchell), Unix: A History and a Memoir (Brian W. Kernighan), The UNIX‑HATERS Handbook (Simson Garfinkel et al.). There's http://folklore.org about the early days at Apple. Asiometry has https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffh3DRFzRL0, a 20 minute bit about the Unix wars.
The source code to the original Microsoft DOS is at https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS. The Anarchist Cookbook is on Kindle, https://www.2600.com/Magazine/digital-back-issues goes back to 2010.
DefCON got too big for the Riv and the Sahara, and is now at the LVCC. Yeah it's not the same. It's never going to be the same, but some still gather for their yearly mecca and watch Hackers and get drunk in hotel suites paid for by corporate sponsors. Others stay home for various reasons.
Do we still keep what we're doing? I mean, I don't program in Z80 ASM assembly anymore. There are still classes in my code by the focus on OOP isn't what it once was. I'm not sure if I want to call it progress, but I don't program Win32 applications anymore. I can spin up a web app with an LLM in an afternoon, and have it web-scale to the whole world in less time than it used to take to get a computer racked in a colo.
It's not 1979, the cable I use to go from USB-C to HDMI is more powerful than the computer that took us to space. By like, a million times.
Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't respect our elders. By this point, though my beard's not yet grey, relatively speaking I am an elder. I learned to program from paper books. Before ChatGPT, before Stack Overflow, before Google. There are some here that predate me by decades. If you're competing with a $10 million Oracle db system, and going from 6 ASM instructions to 5 in the inner loop will eke out that extra percent of performance, and win you the contract, by all means, sit down, roll up your sleeves, and hand optimize assembly in order to figure out how to get rid of that one instruction.
The joke is oft made, that other fields stand on the shoulder of giants, while in computer science, we stand on their toes. And it's not wrong. I can't wait to for the next new language to pop up and reimplement a DAG solver for their package management woes, and to invent a better sandbox for running untrusted code. That's still an unsolved problem. If this stuff interests you, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is worth the visit. The only problem is that at the end of the tour is computers I grew up with, which has a certain way of making a fella feel old.
The travesty that is happening right now, is in the wake of Paul Allen's death, is the debache with his surviving sister and the Seattle Living Computer Museum.
From wikipedia surveillance movie list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_featuring_surveillance, these might interest a tech audience:
Antitrust (2001) Anon (2018) Closed Circuit (2013) Eagle Eye (2008) Equilibrium (2002)
The degree of difficulty for building this is the premise of the 2001 movie Antitrust from back in the old days when Microsoft was evil. Notable as one of the first movies to use Linux desktops and reasonably correct shell script and code in all of their screen shots.
For historical context: this was before the conclusion of the antitrust case that led Microsoft to start softening its stance toward open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
This was the same year Antitrust came out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)
Any support for open source or cross-platform stuff was a bulwark against claims of monopoly abuse, but none of it worked well enough to be a true replacement. Mono worked for some purposes, but it was far from the first party support cross-platform .NET gets today. Nowadays it sounds like .NET Core + third-party GUI libraries is the way to go.
I have a handful of "regulars" that I watch repeatedly. Most of them are at the point now that I've seen them so many times that they can work as "background noise" when I'm coding or doing something else. IOW, I can turn the volume down fairly low and it serves a purpose, but I'm so familiar with the story already that I'm not likely to get drawn into actually paying attention to the movie (as opposed to whatever I'm working on) unless I'm at a point where I need a break anyway.
Some of the ones that are on that list for me:
The Matrix
The Matrix Resurrections
The Social Network
Inception
Sneakers
Hackers
Antitrust
Rad
Tron: Legacy
Vision Quest
Rocky (really the entire Rocky franchise)
The Karate Kid
Kickboxer
Bloodsport
Hard To Kill
Above The Law
There was a movie about this exact thing. Antitrust (2001) was about a Microsoft-like company monitoring everyone’s computer and stealing code.
23 years later and here we are.
You just reinvented the "it's open source but we charge for support" model which has been so well known for so long that it was a line in the movie Antitrust (2001).
The peril of being older is that everything "new" reminds you of something else.
Synapse
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/7/17827992/antitrust-tim-robbins-bill-gates-microsoft-retrospective
Antitrust, released in 2001, is an extremely dot-com-era take on the conspiracy thriller genre. The film starts with hotshot programmer Milo Hoffman (Ryan Phillippe) getting recruited by tech tycoon Gary Winston (Tim Robbins), who runs a massive and ubiquitous computing company called NURV.
Just like Microsoft, NURV is being investigated for antitrust violations, although it’s less clear why. (We learn vaguely that NURV is infamous for cloning software, and that it’s building some kind of media empire with hardware like set-top boxes.) Where Microsoft was once referred to as the “Death Star,” billionaire philanthropist Winston complains about websites calling him Satan. But Milo’s job is to make NURV far more powerful than Microsoft ever was since NURV is about to launch a data network called Synapse that will link “every communication device on the planet.”
Q. Is there a new Gary Winston in town? :-O
Check out the movie AntiTrust from 2001 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
This showed the crazy perks before Google became the powerhouse.
Very happy to see Antitrust getting a shout out. This movie is my favorite double feature with Hackers.
I always assume that a movie like Pushing Tin is about as accurate of a portrayal of the job of ATC as Swordfish or Antitrust is for software development.
The fun 2001 movie "Antitrust" had a bit of the garage lore in it as well. For those of you that have seen the movie, you'll remember.
The "garage myth" isn't a bad one. I believe it's quite inspirational.
"Antitrust" was a fun movie as well.
You may like Takedown (2000) and Antitrust (2001) a lot more than Hackers. Takedown, sometimes referred to as Hackers 2, has nothing to do with the Hackers movie (which in my opinion is pure crap that became popular only thanks to a young Angelina Jolie in it) and tells the dramatized but true story of Kevin Mitnick and how he was captured.
Antitrust is a cult classic to people of a certain generation. It's a terrible movie, but I love it. The hacker character was a pretty boy in glasses (Ryan Phillipe) instead of a total nerd. And Tim Robbins is the worst Bill Gates ever. I need to watch it again some day
Not seen Sneakers but i will watch it now based on your recommendation.
For me, one of the biggest underrated hacking movie is Antitrust. Nobody ever seem to talk about it.
I’m truly delighted to see Antitrust (2001) made it onto the list.
I was very much ‘into’ computer security around the turn of the century, when this film was released, and it totally amazed me with the fact it had no strange FUI “future interfaces” or unrecognisable technology. It was all grounded on the technology stacks I recognised from the time. There was Linux and Gnome and various key-presses and other technical aspects made sense.
There was a believable tech company. There were believable tech company employees.
A real gem of a film, not in terms of narrative or acting, but in terms of plausible accuracy.
I was interviewing for a job recently, and I got asked what got me into coding. It’s not the first time I got asked that same question, and it’s one of my favorites. I love to see the person’s reaction who asks me the question when I tell them the answer.
For me there wasn't one single "thing" that got me interested in coding, but there's no doubt that the book The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder played a key role.
It’s the movie Hackers from 1995! I’m not joking. That’s the movie that made me fall in love with computers, coding, and hacking. Many people consider it cheesy, but I don’t care. I watched it probably twenty times, if not more. I watch it any time I find myself feeling down and unmotivated. It reminds me of those first days, that initial spark. Just like you would reminisce about a beautiful beginning of a past love affair when you feel lonely and unloved.
Yes, "Hackers" is cheesy as hell, but it's simultaneously a great movie in a certain sense. Like the author of TFA, I consider it one of my "comfort movies". I've probably watched it 20+ times, and can always default to watching that when I'm feeling down, strung-out, overwhelmed, etc. Doing so always puts me in a better mood. A few other movies that fall into the same category for me include "Antitrust", "The Matrix", "The Social Network", "War Games", "Tron: Legacy", "Rad", and maybe one or two others.
It depends on what I'm doing. If I'm reading/studying and trying to mostly absorb material, I usually listen to either synthwave (and related: darkwave, horrowave, retrowave, whatever you want to call it), or classical.
If I'm writing code or doing something active like that, the above applies, but add heavy metal to the list of things I might be listening to. But if I'm listening to metal it's almost always only bands and songs that I'm extremely familiar with (eg, have listened to a given song hundreds or thousands of times in my life) as those are less likely to be distracting to me, as opposed to something new where I feel obligated to really pay attention to the music.
One other option is I will sometimes put on a movie that I've watched many, many, many times (eg, The Matrix, Hackers, Antitrust, Tron:Legacy, The Social Network, Rad, Vision Quest, etc) minimize the viewer window and just have the audio in my headphones.
Very rarely I might go with some sort of basically "white noise" track like
"Howling snowstorm and crackling fire" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=volQGswo3dg
"Cyberpunk city sounds" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5zX1eRKEDM&
"Twin Peaks Double R Diner" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npVellnR6D8
"Coffee shop" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMAPTo7RVCo (unless I'm actually sitting in a real-life coffee shop, which I quite often am)
etc.
Code Rush is one of my go-to's when I need inspiration. I was in tech when it came out and it really inspired me how much a group of dedicated programmers could do. https://archive.org/details/CodeRush_616
Same for Triumph Of The Nerds and its follow-up, Nerds 2.0.1 - A Brief History Of The Internet. Fascinating to hear what went on in the back rooms and halls of the people creating the Internet and Web. https://archive.org/details/nerds-2.0.1-a-brief-history-of-the-internet-1998
Hackers Definitely some unrealistic Hollywood effects but, it's fun and is a good representation of how tech in the 90's felt.
Antitrust It's fun to see the obvious digs at Bill Gates. John "Maddog" Hall consulted on this film which is why you see things like Gnome on all the screens. I got to talk to him in the hall at a conference once right after Antitrust came out. Really interesting guy.
Sneakers: One of my all-time favorites. The premise wasn't super-realistic (guy figures out a back door to all encryption and murder ensues) but the technology of the time was otherwise pretty accurately represented, and the acting is superb.
You'll notice that all of these came out over 20 years ago. I haven't seen much since that captures the feeling of what being in technology felt like to me. People still had that sense from the 60's and 70's that technology could be used to make the world better. People really did want to use technology for more than making money off of ads and personal data.
Apollo 13 (1995) - there are various scenes showing the engineers working through various technical problems (much like gravity and the martian)
Antitrust (2001) - The technical portion is goofy, but discusses the open source software movement, VCs, working for a major tech company (an evil bill gates character played by tim robbins)
Sneakers (1992) - Personally, one of my favorite movies of all-time. Code breaking, old school hacking (think wargames). I think the best description i've heard of it is an 1970s caper movie. You will never see a better cast in a movie. Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Ben Kingsley, James Earl Jones, Dan Ackroyd, River Phoenix, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell all play major roles
Mythic Quest (2020) - Apple tv show about creating video games and running a tech company
TLDR:
Microsoft: We have seen Antitrust (2001) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/ and were finally able to implement it after 20 years, this time without murder and conspiracy, all in the open.
Reminds me of the movie Antitrust (2001), where an evil company, modeled after Microsoft, is surveilling programmers to steal their code.
Sounds like the plot of the movie Antitrust.
Remember the movie Antitrust, where Bill Gates type character played by Tim Robbins records everyones computer screens to steal secrets? Thats Zoom for you, minus the murders.
There was a Josh Hartnett/Adam Scott movie called August that's set in the dot-com boom. It's got fairly low reviews but I also don't think they do it justice. Some of the reviews seem to be about how it's impenetrable and hard to understand.
For some lighter fare that others in your family might also connect to, there's Ashton Kutcher's A lot like love but there the dot-com thing is just a side plot.
Also, Antitrust with Ryan Phillippe. Not specifically about the dot-com boom but roughly the same time period.
I mean none of those movies are masterpieces but I think they impart some sense of the time period.
For anyone who isn't old enough to remember the movie Antitrust.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3TwIJjyjPM
Microsoft is just trying hard to achieve Antitrust(movie) villain goals, Github plus "telemetry" is a pretty good coverage.
at least they arent murdering people for the code, yet, afaik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)
There was a movie on this very topic about 17 years ago.
Right down to a thinly veiled character for Microsoft & Bill Gates.
Migel de Icaza even has a cameo.
See "Antitrust" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
Off topic but the title made me think of it, god that movie was horrible. I watched it last weekend after seeing him in the Shooter TV series and was like 'gahhhhhhhhh I can't believe I liked Antitrust in high school'.
Hackers was one of the two movies that got me into development. The other was Antitrust (2001) [1]. I ended up taking AP Computer Programming in high school that year (back when it was C++) and had dreams of going to UIUC and starting a startup in the garage with my good friend.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
Sometimes I listen to metal (my default favorite genre) and sometimes I prefer various forms of electronic music: techno, house, trance, EDM, etc. Other times I go with classical: Dvorak, Wagner, Bach, Fauré, Handel, Vivaldi, Philip Glass, Carl Orff, etc.
But a lot of times what I actually prefer is to put on a movie, one that I've seen like 100 times, so that I know it so well that I don't really get drawn into the story and lose focus. I'll turn the volume down moderately low, enough to be audible but not overly distracting, and play The Matrix, Hackers, Antitrust, Sneakers, War Games, Tron:Legacy, Rad, The Social Network, Inception, or something like that and let that serve as my background noise.
Is it relaying the data over Microsoft (or Azure/Skype/etc) server? Or is it a point-to-point / peer-to-peer connection?
And if it relays the shared data over Microsoft server, what data beside currently opened source code files and keyboard + mouse inputs is transfered? Will it also transfer more source code files (e.g. whole VS project)?
I have to say this feature reminds me of the hollywood movie "Startup" (2001): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
It varies. Sometimes I listen to my "stock" music - hard rock and heavy metal of all varieties, with a special focus on 80's era glam metal, speed metal, and thrash metal.
Other times it's various forms of electronic music. House, trance, europop, Hi-NRG, synthwave/darkwave, etc.
And then sometimes I go with classical music. Bach, Vivaldi, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Orff, etc.
As far as specifics go, here's some stuff I've listened to lately:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8OELzmpgZo&list=PL7F37BB1A67E0238D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9oTQzwXYXk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hd8Or1RrYs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4oZZhpMXP4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyfL9LC1DC4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajF2NOuYkjk
https://youtu.be/-7Q61fH-03E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGMJ2b-3eCk
One other thing I'll sometimes do is put on a movie in the background, with the volume turned down fairly low... just enough that I hear some babble and noise, but not enough that I get caught up in what's going on. This only works if I use a movie I've seen / heard many times, so I already know what's happening and won't get drawn into the story. So, something like The Matrix, Antitrust, Tron:Legacy, Hackers, Sneakers, The Social Network, etc.
Takedown (2000) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/
Antitrust (2001) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
Wasn't this the plot line the movie "Antitrust" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film) ? ;)
Like many others I don´t consider HTML and CSS programming. To some PHP isen´t even a programming language it´s a scripting language. But I ended up programming/scripting PHP. I like it, I feel at home in it, and it does what I want to accomplish. Make stuff for the web. 14 years ago I started learning HTML, I wanted to make websites, after that I had delusions thanks to movies like Operation Takedown, Hackers and Antitrust about being a hacker. I learned the basic concepts in C++, C# and Java, but I diden´t know what I wanted to do, so I froze, and stopped learning in those languages. There is a term PHP is forgiving and it is, some of what is natural to PHP might bite you in the ass if you go on to C# for instance or Java. But you´ve still got a bunch of programming concepts down that you can reuse. If you can find a drive, something you want to accomplish in the language, be it a web or desktop project. Then you will learn. I hope you find this useful. Whatever you decide to do good luck on your journey to becoming a programmer.
Reminds me Antitrust (film).
Oh, and if system calls were copied, MS should be reminded that they supported Oracle's claim that APIs should be copyrightable... Sitting on two chairs much?
Antitrust[1] is good for getting the subtle details right while still having a dramatic plot for Hollywood. I quite liked War Games[2] as well.
[1] http://gb.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
[2] http://gb.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
I really like this, too... I have this movie (and others including Antitrust and, yes, Hackers) in my "night time playlist" for when my wife goes back home to visit family for a few weeks each summer and Christmas. It is a very comfortable movie for me.
Antitrust's "I think my girlfriend is trying to poison my food, so I'll cut myself, expose the cut to that food and see if I get sick" scene ruined the movie for me. I know that's basically how allergy testing works, but it was still cringe-worthy.
As I mentioned in another comment "Pirates of Silicon Valley"[0] is worth a watch and.... (with tongue firmly in cheek) "Antitrust"[1] :) .
[0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122
[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817
It's like from the Antitrust (2001) movie.
It's like the Synapse network from the movie Antitrust. I've always wondered why lower orbit, lower latency service wasn't available sooner.
This is the plot of the movie Antitrust. The idea of spying on potential competitors using surveillance didn't make sense in the movie and doesn't make sense in real life. If this were being done on a scale large enough to stifle innovation we would have heard about it a long time ago.
Really, the post-snowden paranoia is getting out of hand.
Also The Net, Antitrust and David Fincher's Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have very realistic computer sequences.
Antitrust and Social Network also show real source code that compiles (C, Java, Perl, Bash, HTML), Antitrust even explains "Open Source" to the audience. The camera work (especially showing relevant parts of the computer monitors and pan around to keep it engaging for a longer time) on all four movies is really fantastic.
* The Net (1995) - filmed one year before the World Wide Web got traction with the first fully graphical Mosaic web browser: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
* Antitrust (2001) - famous for highlighting the open source movement, features a "CEO" that resembles a mixture of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in one person as evil character, shows Linux desktop and command shell, and shows real Linux developer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
* Social Network (2010) - very realistic, based on real detailed technical blog posts from 2004 on LiveJournal from Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin's memory: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/
* The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) - nmap tool, etc.: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568346/
---
* Jurassic Park (1993) - real 3D file manager application on Unix desktop, first use of OpenGL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/ , see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ and http://fsv.sourceforge.net/
* movies (like The Matrix reloaded) that use the nmap tool: http://nmap.org/movies/
Reminds me of the ending of Antitrust (2001 movie), though they broadcasted the full source code in video:
* Video snip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtZEstimrfA (3:16)
* IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/ (6.1 stars)
* the triva section mentions Miguel de Icaza (creator of GNOME, Mono) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/trivia and one can see various real source code and Linux desktop and command line in the movie
Antitrust (2001) is also great.
Scott McNealy (of former Sun Microsystems) and Miguel de Icaza (creator of GNOME, and Mono) supervised the movie. Several computer scenes involve Gnome Linux desktop, realistic IP address input sequences (though non-public IPs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_IP_addresses ) and an infamous HTML code intro.
Btw. the art style of buildings and interior was awesome.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
The Internship (2013)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2234155/
Good and funny movie, and realistic (if you don't mind the Google logo everywhere)
Antitrust (2001, also known as "Startup")
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
Good movie that shows some C, Java and HTML code and also explains "open source". Miguel de Icaza helped them, so you see GNU/Linux desktops and GNOME shell and bash.
23 is the best hacker film I know of. It's German and based on the Karl Koch story. It's not exclusively about hacking, necessarily, but it is far more realistic than any other I've seen.
Reboot from 2012 is a short film that features a whole lot of real world penetration testing tools and security lingo, but was overall poorly executed and nonsensical. Still worth a look just to spot all the references.
Antitrust is a programmer film. It's somewhat slow-paced and mediocre, but it has a nice scene with the Unix shell and overall tries to mimic the work environment at Microsoft.
Takedown, which although not that good, is a watchable telling of the Kevin Mitnick saga.
Travelling Salesman is based on computer scientists solving P = NP and creating a crypto weapon for use by the U.S. government. Actually quite intellectual, much like Primer.
That's all I can think of right now.
Startup (2001) (also named "Antitrust")
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
it has some C, Java and HTML code. It also explains "open source" and is a pretty good movie. Miguel de Icaza helped them, so you see GNU/Linux desktops and GNOME shell and bash.
I once described AntiTrust as being a movie intended for people who browse Slashdot from Internet Explorer.
I doubt that makes up the bulk of HNers.
Most of them probably use Macs.
I had a different impression. It was the first "computer" movie I'd seen (and one of the few since) that portrayed computer interfaces as what they really were at that time.
Antitrust is another but thats because they hired John "Maddog" Hall as a consultant.
These are some movies/tv series that I deeply enjoyed and (some I) wish I had known about earlier.
9.9 Hitchhiker's guide to the universe, BBC TV series
9.9 Contact (1997) based on a novel by Carl Sagan. Very few people seem to know about this movie.
9.3 War Games
9.0 most Akiro Kurosawa movies:
Seven Samurai
High & Low
The Bad Sleep Well
Ikiru
Red Beard
9.0 Terminator 1 (watch again)
8.8 Terminator 2 (watch again)
8.7 Pirates of Silicon Valley
8.7 Matrix 1 (watch again)
8.7 The Italian Job (featuring Napster's original inventor)
8.7 Live Free or Die Hard
8.5 Track Down or Takedown (about social hacker Kevin Mitnick)
8.5 Revolution OS (2001)
8.5 Dr. Strangelove
8.5 2010 A space odyssey
8.3 Antitrust (2001)
8.3 Sneakers
8.3 COSMOS
8.2 Minority Report
8.2 2001 A space odyssey
8.2 Paycheck (2003)
8.0 The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
8.0 The Net
I'm happy that, finally, people are not shoving 'movie-os' in computer scenes anymore.
The first time I saw real stuff in movies was in Antitrust, then in Tron: Legacy and finally here.
this somehow reminds me of the movie "Antitrust" ...
While not exactly what you're looking for, I find myself going back to http://nanocrowd.com quite often for movie recommendations.
They don't do TV shows, but their niche categories are usually pretty solid.
It works well if you can give them an example of the type of movie you feel like watching. For instance, I wanted to watch a cheesy, nerdy, thriller earlier tonight, something along the lines of Hackers and it suggested The Net, Antitrust, TRON, Live Free or Die Hard, The Matrix, Swordfish, etc. Exactly what I was in the mood for.
This sounds an awful lot like the movie 'The Antitrust'.
This is quite a cool trip down memory lane and kinda makes me miss those old text based interfaces.
The other thing I always enjoy checking out is the "code" being edited on screen - I remember spotting some great code in the movie Antitrust, but I cant remember what it was unfortunately.
Another movie that did reasonably well was Antitrust, using Gnome desktops for all the systems, though IIRC some of the commands used to undelete files may have been made up.
Antitrust http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
Anyone think of the movie Antitrust?
Posted at ~1 AM in the Valley... would love for this to be bumped up during the daytime here. Then again the kinds of people who would comment are probably wide awake right now.
Nonfiction, but thought Fire in the Valley was worth mentioning. Pirates of the Silicon Valley is the movie based on it. Antitrust is also good.
It always bugged me that they used HTML in the Antitrust title sequence to represent code.
As far as I could tell they weren't really doing any sort of web programming in the movie.
As far as computer movies go, Antitrust wasn't too bad; It at least had real code whenever it was needed to be shown on screen.
I would go for some documentaries -
Triumph of the Nerds, Hackers : Angels or Daemons History of Video Games
another one on hacking from National Geographic, i can't recall the name
Antitrust too :P
"Antitrust" is cheesy, but if you suspend disbelief and just treat it as fiction, it's a very entertaining movie. And even Bill Gates is spoofed in the movie.
Antitrust: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
Pirates of Silicon Valley: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/
Which is great. This is an industry where age or tenure are irrelevant. Anyone can make an impact.
If I may, a quote from one of my favorite movies, Antitrust: "Anybody working in a garage can put us out of business"
Antitrust, anyone?
(pretty bad movie, I know, but it makes you wonder...)