Module 11

The movie I chose to watch and write about is WarGames. I had never heard of this movie before and I don’t know why, because it was a great movie. This movie was made in 1983 so the Ideas of super computers and artificial intelligence were still relatively new subjects. This movie depicts the roles that computers could inherit in areas like the military and national security. I have grown up with computers my whole life and to me the three and a half inch floppy disks are rather old school. So to see these eight inch floppy disks, dial-up networks, and computers that filled a whole room opened my eyes as to how far we have come in our technological advancements with computers and networks.

To give a brief synopsis of the movie without being a spoiler : David Lightman, a teenage hacker, accidently stumbles upon a military defense computer and starts a simulation for Global Thermonuclear War, thinking that it is just a game. This causes the government to think that the simulation is real and results in a large amount of chaos. The government catches David and interrogates him while not believing that he accidently started the simulation and accusing him of being a terrorist. Because the government thinks he is a soviet terrorist, Lightman has a very hard time trying to tell them that the computer is still playing the simulation. If the computer finishes the simulation, nuclear missiles will launch and World War III would commence.

WarGames encompasses many different functions and uses of computers back in the eighties. This movie manages to show what home computers were like thirty years ago as well as state of the art, military super computers. One of the first computers seen in the movie is called WOPR. This computer fills almost the whole room. Even though the computer is very large, it can only facilitate a small list of games while learning from its own mistakes or the mistakes of others. At the time this was ground breaking technology, but now a computer with the same functionality would be very cheap and could possibly be the size of an individual’s thumb.

The next computer that is shown in this movie is David’s home computer. This computer has a phone attached to it for dial-up and takes eight inch floppy disks for memory. When looking at the monitor, there is no windows or mac operating system with a full user interface. Up until Windows, these computers ran strictly on input in the form of command prompts. To use one of these computers one would almost need to learn a programming language. Now granted command prompt is a lot simpler than writing common programming code like JavaScript or C#, but it was still a lot more complicated than our method today of just simply clicking the right buttons.

This film shows the great care, thought, and testing that is necessary to automate very critical and life changing tasks through the use of computers. The idea of using the WOPR to automate the task of launching nuclear missiles was a good idea in theory. NORAD conducted a test to see if their employees mentally had what it takes to launch the missiles. Around twenty percent of the missiles were not launched. So their solution was to have a computer to do the task. This would eliminate the problem of human emotions, but they failed to realize how poorly secured the computer was and to take note of bugs in the system that would not allow for a system shutdown or a system override.

An issue I could see arising from WarGames is a new found interest and curiosity in the world of hacking. Because after watching this movie, I was very intrigued about hacking and wanted to learn more and maybe try some of it myself. Not to say that all hacking is bad, because there are many people who can make an honest living from ethical hacking and maybe after this movie companies hired some hackers to test how secure their computers actually were. I just wouldn’t be surprised if after this movie came out, more people wanted to pursue an interest in hacking whether it be ethical or completely illegal.