When the press discovered computer crimes in the 1980s,
reporters took a special interest in the exploits of hackers
under the age of 20. Hollywood quickly grabbed ahold of the
idea, producing a series of tales that took the stereotype of the
teenaged computer nerd and gave the figure demonic powers. For most
audiences in those days, PCs were novel and networks were exotic,
so the people making these stories did not, by and large, strive to
create a realistic portrait. In movieland, computers were magic and
hackers were wizards.
The folks at Found Item Clothing have put together a funny
collection
of clips from the era:
You can quibble with whether some of those really belong
there—Blade Runner was set in the future, for example, so
it wasn’t pretending to represent computers as they actually were.
Still: fun stuff. And it only scratches the surface—they don’t even
get into how computers were represented on TV. (For a particularly
weird bit of ’80s television about hackers, check
this out.)
Today, of course, computers and the Internet are part of the
fabric of everyday life, so the people who make movies and TV are
careful to get everything right.
Or not.
(For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)
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