Amazon MGM Studios
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2025
9:40 · 209K views · Dec 26, 2021
A compilation of the hacking scenes from the 1995 film Hackers, featuring flashy visualizations of computer intrusion.
HN mostly cites it for humor, with one commenter arguing the visuals work as a representation of what goes on in a programmer's mind.
3 comments from Hacker News
> It's an imaginary world which is very hard to depict to other people. It's not purely abstract like mathematics, nor it's fully physical like mechanics. This is one of the reasons I like the movie Hackers - the visualizations are terrible if you take it at face value, but if you think of it as a representation of what's going on inside their minds it works a whole lot better, especially compared to the lines-of-code-scrolling-past version usually shown in other movies/tv. For anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, just the hacking scenes: this video
You are right, and there's historical records to back you up. ;) Phrack touched on it back in 1996, at [LINK] : > First, some words on Macintoshes. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the originators of the Apple and the Macintosh were busted for phreaking in college. The Apple IIe was used almost universally by hackers. So why has the Mac fallen out of favor for hacking? Simple. Because it fell out of favor for everything else. before listing some of the few hacking resources available for Mac. Still, if you go by movies, Hackers, also from 1995, has Macs: this video A year or so later (1996), our hero used a PowerBook 5300 to help save the Earth in Independence Day. Brought to you by Apple marketing. [LINK] and [LINK] . FWIW, [LINK] lists computers used in films.
There's a reason why "circuit as a city" used to be a common visual metaphor in pop culture when computers came up. E.g. this scene from the Hackers: this video