These images are amazing, but most importantly:In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.
Let's hear it for Tron Legacy, the best black and white movie since Young Frankenstein!
What's that? It wasn't in black and white? Then somebody needs to assassinate their art director, stat!
/dev/.udev/ so very ugly and so very much of its time. Now being phased out. Never fear, our descendants will still use bash, but dot directories in /dev will once again be anathema.
Bit puzzled about the Jurassic Park reference though. Sure, FSN is about as far from a stereotypical Unix system as you can get, but it's as real as any faked up Emacs session, doesn't that count for anything? And if you were going to show someone's precocious daughter a Unix system in the early 1990s, would it be the SGI with its wonderful styling and cool graphics, or the uninteresting beige box of a Sun clone running twm?
Not twm, but OpenLook! Which was kinda interesting for the time, at least with its round buttons, weird shadows, button menus, and other UI oddities. But rather than a Unix box, showing off a Lisp Machine would have been significantly cooler. They had a kind of boring GUI for the 1990s, though they were pretty awesome for the 1980s. SGI’s offerings were definitely much more impressive visually, which should make sense given their focus.
It's awesome. I wish they would start doing that with the dialogs too ("- Does anyone know where the master file is? - I do. It's on the web"), but things are going in the right direction.
I watched that movie largely on the strength of this and similar posts advertising the presence of an actual computer interface in a movie about computers.
Boy was that a bad headspace to be in. First he "hacks" the door lock with the cliche door lock hacking device. Then he "uploads the virus" or whatever the fuck, by breaking into the server room, plugging in some file upload device, and watching the cliche progress bar. Then we see about a second and a half of an emacs terminal, and then we're back to every Hollywood OS cliche ever.
Do you think they will change those cliches, once a few civilians start using computers? I mean, we don't necessarily need bash shells, even just a person in a movie using Windows would be a relief. Or what the hell, Mac. What a stretch of the imagination that would be.
Do you want realism, or entertainment? I for one, enjoy the magic UI of movie computers. check out this article http://danhon.com/2010/04/16/the-future-is-movie-os/