Hacking In The 80’s, Your Summer Movie Guide

We learn the best way to win the system in WarGames is to never let Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy start hacking in the first place, Ferris Bueller’s parents should have just bought him a car, not a computer (he hacks into the schools’ mainframe and erases the number of days he’s been absent), and that it’s way more fun to jump in a pool with babes than it is to work on your computer project in Real Genius.

A new Youtube compilation from FoundItemClothing shows us just what Hollywood thought computer programming looked like in the 80’s and it’s hilarious.

To compliment this amazing video clip, I bring you a bit of nostalgic movie magic with the top 5 of my favorite 80’s hacker clips:

1. WarGames – Machine learning, tic tac toe, a rogue computer on the brink of bringing about world destruction and a teenage boy seems to be the only person on the planet who can save us all:

2. Tron – A computer hacker gets sucked into a virtual reality game that has potentially fatal consequences. Okay, yes, the original is slow and there’s no cool Daft Punk appearances…or even music in the background. But I mean a young Jeff Bridges #amiright?

3. Ferris Beuller’s Day Off – It wasn’t computer hacking that made this movie cool. It was simply Ferris. He was definitely “A righteous dude.”

4. Revenge of the Nerds – There is a scene in this movie from 1984 where computer dork Gilbert Lowe actually hacks his way into Judy’s heart. While I had a hard time finding the exact individual clip on Youtube, you can click through here to see it on DailyMotion.

hackers-rotn-gilbert

5. Superman 3 – Richard Pryor isn’t happy with his paycheck so he uses a special hacking code to trick the computer system into giving him a lot more money. Notice how gigantic those computers were.

Bonus – A clip from the TV show Whiz Kids. The show didn’t last too long but this clip where one of the boys explains to a girl he likes that he’s not a nerd but a hacker is just great: