the corner office

I watched WarGames on DVD this weekend. Talk about a blast from the past. 23 years down the line, it's become a little dated of course. It's still an entertaining flick though, and it was worth re-watching for historical interest alone.

The geekery is more proto-geekery than anything else, I guess, because WarGames, was, I think it's safe to say, the mitochondrial Eve of all hacker/cracker movies. Green screens and 3-digit-baud modems and 5" floppies and 16 colour wall graphic displays and arcade games and lousy hairstyles. Tells the kids of today that there was a time when this computer stuff was still mythical and damned near unattainable for your average South African kid, and they won't believe you.

The other major aw-looky-there historical point, of course, is Global Thermonuclear War. Our problems have changed since the Cold War ended and the world discovered that the Soviet arsenal was basically rust and a bit of duct tape. We still worry about terrorist attacks and dirty bombs and directed nuclear attacks from Renegade States With Nutty Leaders, but if you think about it, it's all fairly small-scale compared to when we were still worried about the commies coming to git us, and civilisation distintegrating quite literally, because the whole planet was going to get nuked to hell, all at once. Again, tell the kids of today...

An interesting bit of trivia, that most techie people probably already know - the terms wardialing, and more recently, wardriving and their ilk, got their names from a technique made famous in this movie.