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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

Having been actually hacking in the time when WarGames came out, it portrayed exactly how it was for me and my sphere of young hackers (sans the NORAD visits, of course).

I found Sneakers great, too. Great story, and the TTPs (techniques and tradecraft) were mostly spot-on. Has anybody else been to NewHackCity West (in the bay area, now defunct, AFAIK) and remember the sign out front? :)

Maybe I'm not giving it a fair shake, but Hackers looks awful. I never saw Hackers completely, only scenes and such, but it never interested me and seemed silly and outlandish, as if it were written by some Hollywood outsider who was trying to be as imaginative against stereotypes at the time as possible. It doesn't resonate with me at all (from the scenes I've watched).

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I think you should give Hackers a chance... it is silly and full of hollywood tropes, but it definitely captures the hacker culture of city hacker kids in the 90's. I also think the film pays homage to well known hackers from the 80's and 90's, all the handles of the characters in the movie are named after real people and there are even references to the types of textfiles/books we all shared at the time. If you can suspend your disbelief it's great.

But I do have a soft spot for the movie. It was filmed in the HS I went to (thought I attended a few years later) - there's a scene where one of the characters was redboxing on one of the school payphones, and I got to do that from the same phone as a student in that school - how cool is that?

Did you ever swim in the pool on the roof?

Only when it sprung a leak. Funny enough, there were a few of us that would go hang out on the roof. The stairs were gated, but it was the kind of gate you could reach your arm through and open on the other side. It's a big school though, and in reality there was a pool on the ground floor... so the pool on the narrative would fall apart in real life :D

I never really got why Hackers was always lumped in with Wargames and Sneakers. The vibe of Hackers always seemed way different, with all the "cool dudes wearing sunglasses" and skateboards and flamboyant outfits and EDM music. I mean I like the movie, but it was less of a realistic "computer hacking" movie and more of a "too-cool people partying" movie, much more like Swordfish.

In my experience the movie did a pretty good job of capturing the fun of being a "hacker kid" growing up in NYC in the 90's.

Yeah maybe I'm just being old and grumbly.

Although the vast majority of our crews were skaters/BMXers, we were much more low key and much less flamboyant.

It was at a time when the feds were just starting to take some hacking incidents seriously. At that point in time, if you got caught, you'd usually just get a stern talking to by some authority figure, be it a local cop and/or one of the heads of the org you infiltrated.

I may give Hackers a watch this weekend and try to appreciate it for what it is. I was already adulting by the 90s, so while I was still on the field, I didn't pay much attention to 90s hacker culture, except for who was getting arrested or informing.

By buddy and I were teens doing BBS stuff at the time and walked out of Hackers when they were talking about their FOUR TEEN POINT FOR BEE PEE ESS modems. Snuck in to Braveheart. Don't regret that decision.

I did give it a watch tonight. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought -- 90s fashion and the outlandish hacking scenes aside. It had a decidedly east coast feel and the club reminded me of nHc-west.

Great cast too :)

I can't speak for everyone, but for me Hackers was the first time I was told that being a teenaged computer nerd (I was 15 when it came out), was not freakish. The only options in my experience until then were: Freak (in the should be outcast sense) or Freak (in the look at this genius no one can understand sense). In fact, it can be actually cool!

Sure the movie is cheesy (in all aspects except music really - a lot of that music was independently loved), but the part where it somehow validated my existence made it super important personally. I suspect this is true for plenty of others too - to this day you can go to Defcon (etc) and hear "Hack the Planet!" and more obscure quotes ("its in that place i put that thing that time" or "ugh hardcopy" for example). Even from people who aren't in their late-30s/early-40s.

Hackers is just really fun and light-hearted. There’s something wholesome about the affection which the young hackers have for one another. Also, first Angelina Jolie movie, to my knowledge. The technical aspects are laughably absurd, to the point of being enjoyable (for me).

> sans the NORAD visits, of course

You didn't prank call NORAD?

Curious on your thoughts about Mr. Robot.

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