Hollywood Movie Magic and Computers

Movies are of course fantasy, even those that are based in reality. Over the years computer went from a mystery to common place. Early on the use of computers was overly simplified for the protagonist to accomplish their goals. The actions of the computer had to be made apparent for the movie viewer to know what was going on, but while this was happening, the screen doesn’t always act like a computer we would use.

Some cases in point:

1. Hackers—One of the early 90’s movies about grunge computer toting teens. Everything had a GUI, even the stuff that probably wouldn’t. The villain’s virus screens were silly and over elaborate. And the internet was a 3D virtual world.
2. Jurassic Park—It has been mentioned by others, but I’ve thought about it too. How much could a little girl know about a massive UNIX security system? Her character is a computer nerd, but there are still so many variants that the system could have had.
3. Any movie where massive files and databases are easily stored on one floppy disk or CD. And the information is transferred within seconds, unless time is a factor and we need the suspense of waiting for files to complete uploading.

This is a good start; I’ll revisit some movies and continue this with more.