Hacker Cinema
Superman III
1983 · Film · 125 min
Part of Superman Collection
Directed by Richard Lester
ComedyScience FictionActionAdventure
Aiming to defeat the Man of Steel, wealthy executive Ross Webster hires bumbling but brilliant Gus Gorman to develop synthetic kryptonite, which yields some unexpected psychological effects. Between rekindling romance with his high school sweetheart and saving himself, Superman must contend with a powerful supercomputer.
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12 comments on Hacker News
In a movie. In Superman III.
Richard Donner‘s Superman, the first movie from 78, was a good serious movie. It later got more comical with Richard Pryor in Superman III
P: This sounds familiar.
M: Yeah... they did it in Superman III.
P: Right.
M: What a good movie, actually. And then a bunch of hackers did it in the 70s as well and one of 'em got busted.
P: Well, so they check for this now.
M: No, here's the thing. Initech's so backed up with all the software we're updating for the year 2000, they'd never notice.
P: You're right. And even if they wanted to, they couldn't check all that code.
M: Thumbs up their asses. Thumbs up their asses.
P: So, Michael, what's to stop you from doing this?
M: It's not worth the risk, I got a good job.
P: What if you *didn't* have a good job?
Edit: All of the publicly available scripts and quotes were wrong. Checked the original source. ;@]
sigh
Let me guess: you were born in the 70s to 80s, and the 80s/90s were a formative time for you? That is because you don't remember all the shit that played in whatever golden time period you're imagining. You only remember the hits. You're not accurately remembering the broad distribution of what was on the radio and in theaters in the past, which also contained a lot of crap that you likely never would have wasted your money on. Terrible movies got dumped to TV specials or direct-to-video (today they get dumped to streaming platforms), so even if we filter to what was released in theaters, we're missing a lot of crap.
But how about we look at the top grossing films of 1983 [1], 30 years ago? Some of these hold up and are the classics you remember, like #1 Star Wars Return of the Jedi (still a franchise though), #2 Terms of Endearment, #4 Trading Places, #5 WarGames, #10 Risky Business, #11 National Lampoon's Vacation, #13 The Big Chill, #16 Scarface. Bonafide classics, no question there.
But go even a little down the list and you get middling sequels and formulaic franchise films: #6 Octopussy (formulaic Bond film, which was the Marvel of its time), #7 Sudden Impact (Dirty Harry sequel, not great), #8 Staying Alive (Saturday Night Fever sequel, not great), #12 Superman III (one of the worst Superman films of all time, but ahead of Superman IV), #14 Never Say Never Again (another Bond film, better than Octopussy, but still two in one year), #15 Jaws 3-D (one of the worst action films of all time), #20 Psycho II (another meh sequel).
And these are the top 20 movies ranked on how many people paid to see them in the theaters. There are hundreds of others that were regularly shown in theaters that I'm sure you can't recall. Some are classics now (Videodrome, Monty Python's Meaning of Life), but most are not.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls051080169/
Superhero stories were put on the screen long before CGI.
The Batman series from 60s come to mind or the Superman movies from the 70s (and there Superman III is IMHO the most enjoyable with a Richard Pryor that pulls of a really cool hack).
I forgot about the Field Service techs hah. Straight (outta DeVry) programmer analyst types like https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/superman-iii/27817/what-superman-3-teaches-us-about-computer-programming were pretty much considered users in the DEC world. That is, there was a distinction between systems programmers and applications programmers (who might use a DEC-specific forms-management library or a database API but didn't really even necessarily know what model their harmless-to-the-other-users code was running on).
Another interesting part of that movie is the salami slicing plot line. Salami slicing is the name for collecting factional cents off thousands of transactions to accumulate a big payout without people noticing. It's featured in a bunch of movies:
- Superman III
- Hackers
- I love you Philip Morris
- Office Space
I mention it in my talk about how to program database systems safely when handling money to avoid situations like that. It can also happen by accident when converting between floats and Decimals incorrectly while programming.
https://github.com/pirate/django-concurrency-talk
That is basically the premise of that Richard Pryor movie Superman III
The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a western (probably American) cultural artifact
It was around that time in the 80s that "the nerd" or "the geek" became a staple movie character. Computers up 'til then had just been a piece of industrial machinery like a lathe or a microscope. Now they were associated with "losers". Richard Pryor in Superman III. Revenge Of The Nerds. Etc etc.
And by and large society was perfectly happy to relegate computing to these losers and shun them. Noone cared about the demographics of these losers, either, it was not "problematic". It's only recently when the geeks have built something that took over the world, that people are saying, hey, I didn't do the work or make the sacrifices but I deserve the rewards. That's where we get "brogrammers" et al.
To quote from that movie:
“Yeah, they did it in Superman III.”
Note that Autism and Asperger's Syndrome are "male dominated". Something like 4:1.
If you have a field toward which nerds gravitate, it will become male-dominated.
What happened around 1984? Yes, home computers were becoming much more common as the article aptly notes.
But what else? It was becoming obvious that the people who flocked to these things most, who outright related to these computers, were nerds.
Popular culture latched on to this instantly!
What was on the big screen and on TV?
- War Games (1983)
- Superman III (1983) - Major character is a computer nerd played by Richard Pryor (August "Gus" Gorman).
- Riptide TV Series (1983) [1] - Major character Murray "Boz" Bozinsky is an utter nerd
- Whiz Kids TV Series (1983) [2]
When 1984 rolled around the trend went all out:
- Revenge of the Nerds (1984)
Nerd stereotypes were in the spotlight, as well as the connection between nerds and technology, especially computers. And that of course is going to have some effect on enrollment in fields of study having to do with computers. Young people respond to stereotypes in mass culture.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riptide_%28TV_series%29
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_%28TV_series%29
PETER This sounds familiar.
MICHAEL Yeah. They did this in Superman III.
PETER Yeah. What a good movie.