At the time people were essentially upset that it misrepresented hacking as cool, where actually it was geeky. Today it's easy to take for granted that people understand personal computing, but there was a time when most adults didn't know anything about them. Those of us who did wanted to spread that understanding, and it was nothing like the street fashion and colorful animations of Hackers.

There's also an East Coast / West Coast dynamic involved. West Coast hacking was optimistic/idealistic about depth of knowledge and engineering, and East Coast was more cynical/realistic about social groups and control. Compare Apple to Facebook, the Homebrew Computer Club to 2600 magazine, custom hardware to script kiddies. This movie is a hip Hollywood take on the East Coast scene, while War Games and Sneakers are West.

Hackers was originally a guilty pleasure, but it's aged very well. I was happened to watch it again last week, and organizing a global DDoS to take down a command and control node for an industrial control virus and prevent a terrorist attack was a bit ahead of its time. Part of the visionary magic was directly involving the community, particularly Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600.

I wish the business side of it was doing a better job though. There has always been a cult following that they aren't tapping into... The original may be a poorly typeset laser printout, but why has there never been an official "Trust Your Technolust" poster?