The 1983 movie War Games is still one of my favorites. This video is a bit nerdy, even by my standards. But I don't care.
A lot of the details are nonsense, but it got the smell right. It understood what computer culture felt like in the early 1980s. a smart kid in a bedroom, a modem, a pile of obscure hardware, weird blinking lights, late night modem dialing, and the sense that if you knew just a little more than everybody else, you might accidentally open a door that you were never supposed to find. And that is why this movie still works on computer people.
Of course most of it is Hollywood cheating. If you ever used a dialup modem from the 1980s you know that the screens didn't work that quickly. And that's just one part of it.
When I discovered computers were a giant mathematical puzzle, I wanted one. My parents were convinced that they were just expensive toys, so I didn't get one. (They were expensive.) The IMSAI 8080 was one of the premiere computers of the day that you could hope to have in your home. That was the home computer in the movie.
The question is not was the computer real, because it was. The question is where did the movie actually cheat? And in reality, War Games cheats all over the place. It cheats on what the front panel is doing. It cheats on what the monitor is doing. It cheats on the modem. It cheats on the voice. It cheats on the AI. And yet somehow by cheating in exactly the right places, it winds up feeling more authentic than a lot of movies that were technically more careful.
Wargames Movie Magic: Where it Cheats - IMSAI & WOPR! It is a 16 minute video, so grab a coffee.
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