It was the coolest movie trailer in the summer of 1983. A robotic synthetic voice asked "SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?" as the words themselves spooled out across a computer screen. And David Lightman (played by a nearly unknown Matthew Broderick) answered back: "How about 'GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR'?"... unleashing a phantom Soviet missile attack and chaos inside of NORAD.
OMG!!! IT WAS AWESOME!!
Okay, so ordinary people didn't scream Internet (or even mundane) slang in all-caps back then. Actually, nobody I knew had ever even been online... except maybe those guys who kept round-the-clock vigil inside the university computer lab and spoke amongst themselves in Elvish. But for the rest of us, David Lightman's hack in to the ARPANET was our first entry into the world of hacking, personal computers, dial-up connections, and extremely large floppy disks.
Young America packed the theaters, Roger Ebert gave the film a rousing thumbs-up, and computer science majors must have tripled that fall after the summer movie geekathon! Even a decade later, I got a special WarGames rush when I opened the back of a new PC, installed a 14.4 Kbps dial-up modem, and then dialed my first number, heard the handshake, and logged in.
The movie rocked my world. So what did I think when I heard there would be a special 25th Anniversary big screen presentation? I was: 1)Thrilled. 2)Worried.
Worried? Yes. What if it didn't hold up after all these years? I really hadn't seen the film since Matthew Broderick (like us) was still a fresh-faced kid. And the technology involved could — you know — be called a little... old. I mean, the first Mac didn't even come out until a year later. And now? In a single day, I can confront two unique virus threats to my work PC, conduct business by email with prospective magazine contributors located anywhere inside the English-speaking world, send an article typed from a prone position on my laptop to an online magazine that could be housed literally anywhere in close enough proximity to Earth, and practice lightsaber technique, backgammon, and advanced Sudoku on my iPhone. If you're reading this, you are already online and can add your own litany of everyday computer marvels.
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