Silver Screen OS

by Tim Dean on Jun 30, 2006

Tim Dean on the Hollywood OS running the world's biggest computers via a green flashing cursor and bleeps.

I can only imagine that when members of the special forces doff their black Kevlar vests and wash the camouflaged streaks from their faces, and recline at the end of a long day with a beer and the remote control, they are continually wracked by outbursts of incredulity at their portrayal in television and movies.

I can picture them leaning to their partner and quietly whispering “Now that’s just nonsense – that guy’d never use a MK-21 flashbang in a delta maneuver like that”. To which their partner would politely smile and nod, and go back to enjoying the on-screen shenanigans.

I’m thinking this because I know it’s exactly what people like you and I do every time we see a computer portrayed in a movie. Why must it be so?

Can you think of the last time you saw an accurate portrayal of a computer in Hollywood? I can
only think of a few rare moments, such as when Trinity uses Nmap to bring down the electrical grid in Matrix Reloaded. However, these are the rare exceptions.

Possibly the most fantastic element of movie computers is their unique operating system. I call it Hollywood OS. It’s easily identifiable from its black screen with bright green text that inexplicably makes a bleeping noise whenever a character is typed in.

HACKING HOLLYWOOD
It’s like Hollywood discovered computers in the 1980s, sat back and said “we like it here”, and decided that computers would forever more be portrayed in a similar ilk. Kind of like Eastern Europe did with fashion.

Evidently the blinking green CGA cursor turned out to be such a powerful dramatic device that Hollywood just couldn’t let go of it to embrace GUIs, windows or even mice.

But Hollywood OS is not without its graphical components. Occasionally, a wayward key press will bring up a stunning 3D vista of vector graphics that represent a directory structure or complex of firewalls.

Brief spurts of further key presses will allow the user to rotate the image or zoom in on the ‘node’ that is currently under attack from the villainous hacker (you can tell it’s under attack because it’s flashing red with skull and crossbones all over it...).

I suppose it is understandable that Hollywood would reject Windows XP as a dramatic device. In the early 1980s, back before the proliferation of home PCs, the obscure practices and cryptic language of contemporary computing was quite alien and even somewhat romantic.

Much of this probably came from its very unfamiliarity to most of us.

I also think command lines have a certain intrinsic mystery about them. They appear to have an obscure impenetrability that only those gifted with the arcane arts of programming or hacking can master.

And at the end of the day, double-clicking colorful icon A in order to initiate the logic bomb/doomsday device is just not that dramatic. It just doesn’t look like that much of a challenge.

Yet I do wonder whether there aren’t some realistic computer scenarios that would make good stories, and wouldn’t require the use of Hollywood OS to spruce things up.

It’s not like every action movie that uses special forces plays out like a video game. Some are actually quite realistic in their portrayals. Surely the same could be done for computers.

It’s also not like there aren’t millions of people worldwide who are fairly computer-savvy, and who might like not being condescended to by some pony tailed Hollywood scriptwriter.

In the end, I still expect we’ll have plenty of green bleeping text, vector graphics and a distinct lack of mice before that day comes.

This article appeared in the July, 2006 issue of PC Authority.