Hi everyone,
Does David's use of what I assume technically qualifies as "the Internet" to dial in to Protovision (actually the WOPR at NORAD) amount to the first time the Internet is used in a movie?
Granted, like I said, it's not called "the Internet" by anyone, but that's essentially what it is, right? A large number of interconnected computer networks.
[deleted]
There were at least 2 other movies with similar hacking techniques that came out the same year - Superman 3 and Electric Dreams. All 3 featured hacking done via telephone lines. And there were other hacker movies before these, such as Tron and Blade Runner, but I don't know if those count since I can't remember if anyone dialed into computers in those.
And it was kind of an early form of internet, just connecting via phone lines instead of TCP/IP. The early internet, called ARPANET, did exist back then and it was used mainly by universities and the military back then, so I guess David was sort of connecting to the internet.
the internet is a network. does he actually hack into any network? the school and NORAD were just single line connections. he was only talking to one system at a time. actually, when he contacts the airline i think is the closest he gets to a networked system.
shareWell the phone lines are a network themselves. It was the beginnings of the internet.
share"Well the phone lines are a network themselves."
Not a computer network. It's basically a 'net' without the 'work' part.
A phone grid (as it was called - 'grid' is not a 'network' necessarily) didn't allow you to communicate with multiple nodes simultaneously. You just connect to one line, and that's it. You can't connect to another phone line unless you disconnect your current connection.
This makes it different from a 'network', from where you can connect to any other computer without losing your initial connection. If you call to your company network, for example, you can then access any computer that's in that network, and still be online.
If every computer has a separate phone number, you can't do any 'networking' - you have to disconnect and reconnect every time you connect to another computer.
This is what's happening in the movie, so its not only internet, it's not any network whatsoever.
It uses the phone grid to connect from one modem to another, and that's all that happens here. It's a DIRECT CONNECTION.
Internet is a 'worldwide network' that has millions of computers (inter)connected to each other, that you can access freely at any time without disconnecting anything. It's not a direct connection, it always goes via or through something. You only connect directly to your ISP, and from thereon, the ISP gives you access elsewhere.
Internet didn't really exist in a practical form that masses could utilize back then.
In 1983, your only practical choices for connecting computers were either direct computer-to-computer connection (only one computer at a time), using a BBS that could possibly have multiple phone lines that could then be used to connect other computers (though technically this was still just a computer-to-computer direct connection, it wasn't just -any- computer, but set up exactly to receive computer calls and serve the user of the computer with all kinds of things, nicely accessible by a visual menu..
..whether it was offering files to download, Door-games to play, statistics and other information, messaging between users and also messaging the SysOp, chatting with sysop or other users (if they had multiple phone lines), and later, even access to the internet).
David didn't use the internet, and this movie has nothing to do with the internet.
Nowadays people can't imagine computer and phone line connections without the internet, but the world was very different before the masses adopted the internet.
[deleted]
A large number of interconnected computer networks.
no he didnt . the internet was alive and well in 83.
shareIt's not the internet. It's like sending faxes to every other fax machine in town, except he's using a computer instead of a fax machine. This is how Compuserve and, I believe, AOL got their start, but it had nothing to do with the internet.
sharewargames is more or less a variation of 'colossus' (1979) in which a u.s. supercomputer connects to a soviet supercomputer.
shareThis isn't the internet, it's a peer-to-peer system. The Internet is a server/client based system. In the 80s, home users would mostly use this technology to connect to public systems called BBSs (bulletin board systems). These normally had message boards, file downloads and a few games. You can still find people running these systems on the internet, mostly through telnet as a throwback to the good old days.
share