Zero Cool and Acid Burn

HBO has been showing Hackers a ton lately, and I can't help but leave it on when I come across it, it's truly an underappreciated 1990s touchstone. It is SO 1995! It is super stylish and fun, but suffers from the same problem all movies about computer action suffer from: trying to make something inherently static and nonvisual, people typing and staring at screens, exciting with lots of dubious digital animation of floating numbers and fractals, spinning steadicam shots and techno music. It does help to be able to watch sexy, young Angelina Jolie (when she was curvy!) and Jonny Lee Miller doing all the typing. (And bonus: Oscar winner for Best Documentary Fisher Stevens as the evil hacker, Plague!)

So, do kids born in, say, 1990 (you know, they're called college students?) look at this movie the way I look at, I don't know, Wargames? Like, haha, how archaic! They keep talking about modems! And look, is that a floppy disk? I remember those. In all seriousness, it is kind of crazy how ancient some of this seems, and it was fifteen years ago. And for the record, I saw Wargames in the theater too. It scared the shit out of me. Mommy, are we going to be blown up by the Russians? Quite possibly, dear.

Look, here's proof of how old I am in computer terms: this is my first piece of computer class homework, school year uncertain, unearthed recently from the Brett Rollins archives, i.e. my parents' basement. I got 100%!