My guilty pleasures for this genre are "Hackers" (Hack the planet!! WOOO!) and "Office Space".
One also cannot mention these without adding the excellent "Sneakers" with Robert Redford.
One also cannot mention these without adding the excellent "Sneakers" with Robert Redford.
Eg, there's a lot of social engineering, and taking sensible precautions like not using your own connection. The villain's plot of hijacking a control system and extorting money is perfectly modern.
Sure, there's a bunch of colorful graphics they put on top of that, but it's arguably a visual representation of "being in the zone", and something that's done in virtually every other piece of media ever. Any real job includes lots of boring work that never ends up on the screen, and you just get the highlights.
I mean, isn't that pretty much what happened this week with that gas pipeline?
In say, an Unix system, a tape robot is going to be hooked up to some sort of SCSI device, and probably nothing prevents two people from commanding it at once in conflicting ways.
Two people logged into the same system trying to figure out who the other one is and kill their login process or to disable whatever way the other guy used to get in -- also possible.
Even two people typing at each other is a thing. Linux has the 'write' and 'wall' commands, and there even was a realtime chat program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yX29R81doY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctyvNidBF0w
So yes, the entire scenario of two people breaking into the same computer, sending conflicting commands to the tape robot, trying to kick the other one out, and even sending chat messages at each other is very much something that's plausible on an Unix system. Just without the colorful graphics.
It's aged very well; it was slightly cringe-worthy in its time. I watch it over about once a year now.
I believe Emmanuel Goldstein consulted on the film.