This question is for tech people. Would a modern personal computer be more powerful than the supercomputer in this movie? Has technology moved to that level?
shareOf course. WOPR is a complete ABACUS compared to today's GAMING PCs, let alone supercomputers!
The short answer is yes.
The long answer is that different kinds of computing have different types of metrics. But to put a frame around it the Cray-2 supercomputer, probably the most powerful supercomputer in 1985, could be outperformed in terms of raw computing power by an Sega Dreamcast video game console released in 1998.
The Cray X-MP was the world's fastest computer from 1983 to 1985 with a performance of 0.8 GFLOPS.
iPhone 11 CPU does 155 GFLOPS and way more with its GPU. So a modern phone is at least 200 times more powerful than an 80s supercomputer that cost $15 million.
FLOPS - floating point operations per second
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP
https://gadgetversus.com/processor/apple-a13-bionic-specs/
Do you know of any modern real world computer that achieved virtual sentience and bucked its programming?
shareIf a computer had sentience i expect it would be killed or you would never hear about it.
shareThe modern smartphone may be the most advanced hardware ever created. When you consider the huge amount of applications/data transfer/online information available, it's mindblowing how advanced a modern smartphone is! Paradoxically, smartphone technology may have peaked at the end of 2010s decade. Apart from more memory space and faster data transfer I can't see any major tech advance in smartphones. It's possible phones of 2020s decade will be near identical in 50 or 100 or 500 years time. Unless you can time travel using your phone or teleport to a new location lol... I can't see any new groundbreaking tech for phones.
We're fortunate to have lived through an historic moment in world history. It's easy to forget how things have changed so much in the last few decades. For example, streaming hd video wasn't possible at the start of this century. If you wanted to download Wargames off the net (assuming someone had uploaded it).... it would have taken days!
You would think this because this is the time you have lived in.
Think of people who was around when first commercial aircraft appeared or even electric.
wont be a phone in 100 years.
there are limits though
An engineer would say "2000 mph is the fastest a passenger jet will go due to heat and aerodynamics"
A money man with no technical ability at all will say
"in 1910 the wright brothers flew 100 yards at 50 mph , in 1975 concorde crossed the atlantic at 2000 mph.
thats 40x faster in 65 years
Therefore I expect you to make a plane that flies at 80,000 mph by 2040"
"The modern smartphone may be the most advanced hardware ever created."
Not even close. It's just a bunch of consumer-grade technologies crammed together in one shell: a small computer, a radio transceiver, a small LCD display, and a digital camera are the main technologies it bundles together. All of them have very poor performance compared to the best examples of those technologies in standalone form.
"For example, streaming hd video wasn't possible at the start of this century."
Yes, it was. There were fast internet connections available in 2000, such as a T3 line, which is 45 Mbps. That's about 10 Mbps faster than the cheap cable connection I'm using right now, and I can certainly stream HD video. T3 wasn't even the fastest, but it was the fastest that say, a company or university back then was likely to have.
As for consumer-grade internet, lots of people had cable internet in 2000. I first got cable internet in 2002 and I live in a small town (I got it when it first became available here). Mine was 3 Mbps, but some areas had faster speeds available than that, especially outside the US.
"If you wanted to download Wargames off the net (assuming someone had uploaded it).... it would have taken days!"
No. A typical pirated movie in 2000 was a 700 MB DVD-rip (recompressed with Divx or, starting in 2001, Xvid, with an AVI container), which only took about a half hour to download if you had 3 Mbps cable internet like I had in 2002. Even if it were an untouched DVD-rip, say, 6 GB, it would only take about 4½ hours to download at 3 Mbps.
On 56 Kbps dial-up internet, a 700 MB movie took about 28 hours to download; a long time for a download, but not "days."
Thank you, professor.
I do recall the turn of the century and pretty sure I had my first cable connection right around 2001. Can't recall exactly.
I never did try to download an entire film on 56K, though. That does seem like it would've taken longer than 28 hours.
"I never did try to download an entire film on 56K, though. That does seem like it would've taken longer than 28 hours."
Why didn't you just do the math yourself if you thought ~28 hours was unbelievable?
There are 3,600 seconds in an hour, so you can download 56 × 3,600 Kb per hour, which = 201,600 Kb per hour.
Dividing 201,600 Kb (kilobits) by 8 to get KB gives you 25,200 KB (kilobytes) per hour.
Dividing 25,200 KB by 1,024 to get MB gives you 24.61 MB per hour.
24.61 KB per hour × 28 hours = 689.1 MB downloaded in 28 hours.
As I said, the typical pirated movie size back then was about 700 MB (700 MB is the maximum capacity of a CD-R burned in data mode, though 650 MB versions exist too).
They started by ripping a DVD using a DeCSS type program, which gave them a file that was several GB in size. Then they re-encoded the video stream with some implementation of MPEG-4 ASP, usually DivX 3.11 Alpha in combination with Nandub which allowed for two-pass encoding for higher quality in a 700 MB file, and that was later supplanted by Xvid, which had two-pass encoding functionality built in (no need to use Nandub to get that functionality anymore), which was typically used in combination with VirtualDubMod. And the original AC-3 audio stream from the DVD was usually encoded to a 128 Kbps (CBR) or VBR MP3. The container was usually AVI.
"aXXo" was the name of the most prolific release group of the time (I'm not actually sure if aXXo was a group or just one person).
One thing to keep in mind is that 56K never actually ran at 56K. (At least this was true in the US due to FCC guidelines. Not sure about elsewhere.) Maximum download speeds actually topped out at 53K and, if I remember correctly, the upload speed usually topped out around 33K (which obviously has a great effect if you're downloading peer-to-peer from someone who is uploading from a 56K modem).
share"One thing to keep in mind is that 56K never actually ran at 56K. (At least this was true in the US due to FCC guidelines."
I've heard that for ages, but I've never seen any proof, such as a citation from the FCC's website. The FCC limits the power output of devices connected to the phone line, but it seems to just be someone's oft-repeated theory that that translates to a maximum speed of 53.3K from a dial-up modem (feel free to provide an FCC citation that specifically says that they restrict dial-up speed to 53.3K though, because I'd genuinely like to see it).
Either way, even at 53.3K, that still doesn't amount to "days" to download a 700 MB movie. It just means it will take 29.89 hours instead of 28.44 hours.
"if I remember correctly, the upload speed usually topped out around 33K (which obviously has a great effect if you're downloading peer-to-peer from someone who is uploading from a 56K modem)."
That only applies if you were downloading from only one person, and if it was one of the P2P networks that didn't use a central server. Also, P2P networks weren't the only way to download movies. There were (and are) also binary newsgroups, which is where many, if not most, of the movies people downloaded/uploaded on P2P networks originated from in the first place. With newsgroups you're downloading from a high-bandwidth server, not from some random person's PC.
ChatGPT
shareNot techie but I don't think you have to be. Just look at how much effort he has to go to "enter" sites and do things. It is mostly DOS style. Sure he is mostly doing things he shouldn't be doing but if they made the same film now he wouldn't need half the stuff he needs in the movie.
share