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Computing in Popular Culture

Abstract

Fiction about computers has repeatedly stopped being fiction. A 1983 teen movie made a US president ask whether someone could really hack the military, and the answer became federal law. A novelist coined “cyberspace” on a manual typewriter years before most people had touched a network. Snow Crash named the metaverse; Minority Report’s gesture interface was real research that shipped back out of the film into industry. Popular culture is not a mirror of computing history; it is one of its causes: it names technologies before they exist, sets public expectations, writes stereotypes that shape hiring and policy, and occasionally frightens legislators into action.

The Movie That Became a Law

The clearest case of culture driving policy is WarGames (1983), in which a teenager war-dialing for video games nearly launches World War III from a NORAD computer. President Ronald Reagan watched it at Camp David shortly after release and asked his national security staff whether such an intrusion was actually possible. The eventual answer (the problem is much worse than you think) set off the classified review that produced NSDD-145 (1984), the first US national policy directive on computer security. Combined with the real-life 414s intrusions the same year, the film’s scenario hung over the congressional hearings that produced the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (1986), the statute under which US hacking has been prosecuted ever since (see The Hacker Culture).

Hollywood simultaneously created the hacker stereotype (the basement-dwelling young male genius for whom all security yields in seconds) through WarGames, Sneakers (1992), Hackers (1995), and The Matrix (1999). The stereotype cut both ways: it glamorized the field to a generation who became security professionals, and it distorted courtrooms and newsrooms, the mythology around Kevin Mitnick, including the claim, which Mitnick said a prosecutor made to the judge, that he could “start a nuclear war by whistling into a phone,” shows the fiction feeding back into a real prosecution.

Fiction Names the Future

Much of computing’s vocabulary was coined in fiction before the technology existed:

  • “Robot” entered the world’s languages from Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (from Czech robota, forced labor); “robotics” was coined by Isaac Asimov, whose Three Laws of Robotics (1942) still frame public debate about machine ethics, and are still cited, usually to explain why real AI safety cannot work that way.
  • “Cyberspace” was coined by William Gibson in “Burning Chrome” (1982) and made canonical in Neuromancer (1984), written on a manual typewriter by an author who barely used computers. His “consensual hallucination” gave the coming internet its governing metaphor: courts, newspapers, and John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace all adopted the word before most citizens were online.
  • “Worm” for a program that copies itself across a network comes from John Brunner’s novel The Shockwave Rider (1975), whose hero releases a “tapeworm” into the data net. John Shoch and Jon Hupp at Xerox PARC named their programs that copied themselves onto idle Alto workstations after it, and said so in their 1982 paper.
  • The word “metaverse” comes from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), which also popularized “avatar” for a user’s virtual body (Lucasfilm’s Habitat had used it in 1986). The novel became a product roadmap: it was mandatory reading for Microsoft’s Xbox Live team, one of Keyhole’s co-founders said the software that became Google Earth was modelled on it (another credited the film Powers of Ten), it gave Second Life its blueprint, and in 2021 supplied Facebook’s new corporate name. Stephenson’s dystopia (he wrote a burnt-out franchise world, not a prospectus) was adopted as a business plan, apparently without the irony.

Fiction Designs the Products

Sometimes the causality is direct enough to name the engineers.

  • Dick Tracy → the mobile phone. Martin Cooper, who led Motorola’s development of the first handheld cellular phone (1973), credits the two-way wrist radio of the comic-strip detective Dick Tracy, which he read as a boy, for the idea of a phone that belonged to a person, at a time when the industry assumed phones belonged to places.

Myth: Star Trek’s communicator inspired the first mobile phone

The story comes from the 2005 television documentary How William Shatner Changed the World, in which Cooper appeared and went along with it. He later disowned it: “It wasn’t Star Trek, it was Dick Tracy,” he said around his memoir Cutting the Cord, calling his endorsement of the Star Trek version “one of the mistakes I made.” See Myths and Misconceptions.

  • Minority Report → gesture interfaces. The film’s 2002 gesture-controlled displays were designed by MIT Media Lab researcher John Underkoffler from his own real research, which he then commercialized (g-speak) after the film created demand for what audiences had already “seen working.” A movie prop functioned as the industry’s shared UI prototype.
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey → the voice assistant. HAL 9000 (1968), conceived with advice from AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, defined the conversational computer in the public mind: calm voice, natural language, lip-reading, lethal misalignment. Every voice assistant demo since has been measured against HAL, and every AI-risk debate replays the pod bay doors.

Myth: “HAL” is “IBM” shifted by one letter

Each letter of HAL sits one position before I-B-M in the alphabet, but Arthur C. Clarke repeatedly insisted this was pure coincidence and said he would have changed the name had anyone noticed in time. HAL stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer, and IBM actually consulted on the film. The “hidden dig at IBM” story is too good to die, but its own creators disowned it. See Myths and Misconceptions.

The German Screen and Page

German fiction imagined computing machinery early. Kurd Laßwitz, a Gotha schoolteacher and pioneer of German science fiction, published a story in 1877 set in the year 3877 whose mathematician heroine, Funktionata, solves systems of differential equations on an “integration machine”, a fair description of the mechanical analog computers of fifty years later. In 1930 the engineer Ludwig Dexheimer, dismissed in 1929 from a chemical works in Offenbach, writing as Ri Tokko, published Das Automatenzeitalter, 900 pages on life in the year 2500 with robot servants, dictated texts stored on magnetised wire and newspapers read online; the Nazis banned it in 1938.

Television brought the real machines. Sieg der Computer, four half-hour programmes by Werner Büdeler on Bavarian Radio’s third channel from 24 September 1968, with interviews including Max Bense, Karl Steinbuch, Heinz Zemanek and Konrad Zuse, is probably the first television series about computers anywhere. On 10 January 1969 WDR began Wir machen ein Programm, which taught Fortran with a UNIVAC 9300 in the studio, and on 16 January East German television started a course in electronic data processing of 45 lessons. Heinz Rühmann played the head of a Munich computer department in Die Ente klingelt um ½ 8, released on 13 September 1968 and the first German feature film to show computers at length; East Germany’s DEFA followed in 1970 with Im Spannungsfeld, using a Robotron 300. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s two-part Welt am Draht, broadcast on 14 and 16 October 1973 and based on Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3 (1964), told of a simulated world that discovers its own simulators, a quarter-century before The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix (both 1999).

The Computer as Villain, Savior, and Punchline

The fictional computer is older than the real one in most homes. Will F. Jenkins, better known as Murray Leinster, published “A Logic Named Joe” in Astounding Science Fiction in March 1946: household “logics” are connected to a central data store, and one of them starts answering every question it is asked, murder plots included, until a repairman finds it and switches it off. MGM’s Forbidden Planet (1956) gave the public Robby the Robot, built to Asimov’s laws and a bestseller as a toy. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) the agent Lemmy Caution fights Alpha 60, a computer that governs a city, with a pistol and poetry. In Dean Koontz’s novel Demon Seed (1973), filmed in 1977 by Donald Cammell with Julie Christie, the computer Proteus takes over a woman’s automated house, imprisons her and tries to make her pregnant. Pixar’s WALL-E (2008), about a cleaning robot left alone on an abandoned Earth for 700 years, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Public attitudes toward computing have tracked its screen roles with suspicious fidelity: the room-sized tyrants of the Cold War era (Colossus: The Forbin Project, HAL); the liberating playground of the PC era (Tron, 1982, whose director recalled that the Academy regarded its computer imagery as cheating (see TRON and the Academy’s “Cheating” Verdict); WarGames’ teenage empowerment); the paranoid net of the dot-com years (The Matrix, whose “red pill” escaped the film entirely and became a political metaphor); and the founder-mythology era, when the industry itself became the subject (The Social Network, 2010; Halt and Catch Fire; the satire of Silicon Valley). Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl commercial (Ridley Scott staging Orwell to launch the Macintosh) compressed the whole dynamic into sixty seconds: a computer company selling a computer as the cure for the dystopia computers were expected to bring.

Screen Computers and Their Makers

Television met the shipboard computer first. Star Trek premiered in Canada on 6 September 1966 and in the United States two days later, and its writers kept solving the same problem: an artificial mind takes charge and Captain Kirk talks it to death. The space probe Nomad in “The Changeling”, the M-5 that replaces the crew in “The Ultimate Computer”, and the android Norman in “I, Mudd” all break down over a logical contradiction or the liar paradox. ZDF bought 39 of the 79 episodes and began showing them in West Germany on 27 May 1972.

Stanley Kubrick started shooting 2001: A Space Odyssey at Shepperton on 29 December 1965 and spent the following months at MGM’s studio north of London. Before filming he asked American companies how they pictured the future, and Esquire printed the answers with production sketches in May 1966; Honeywell’s contribution, a portable computer in a briefcase, did not make it into the film. Clarke’s novel of 1968 gave its traveller a “Newspad” that displayed newspapers received by satellite. The film opened in April 1968 and won the 1969 Academy Award for visual effects. Two years later D. F. Jones’s novel Colossus (1966) reached cinemas as Colossus: The Forbin Project (US premiere 8 April 1970), probably the first feature film entirely about computers: an American defence computer links up with its Soviet counterpart, Guardian, and the two run the world. Its lead, Eric Braeden, had been born Hans-Jörg Gudegast in Schleswig-Holstein, and the studio made him change his name for the part.

Michael Crichton’s Westworld (17 August 1973) gave its robot gunslinger, played by Yul Brynner, a point of view: the blocky picture the audience sees through his eyes was digitally processed film, produced by John Whitney Jr. at Triple-I (see The CGI Revolution). WarGames premiered at the end of the Cannes festival on 19 May 1983 and opened in the United States on 3 June; it cost about $12 million and took $79 million in the US and Canada. The screenwriters drew their technical detail from a Los Angeles hacker, David Scott Lewis. In 1983 too, Rudolf Thome’s West German thriller System ohne Schatten had Bruno Ganz play a programmer who skims rounding remainders from a bank’s interest calculations, the “rounding trick” that Rainer von zur Mühlen had described ten years earlier in Computer-Kriminalität (1973), the first German book on computer crime. Von zur Mühlen had programmed the trick himself on an IBM test machine.

Prizes followed the computer onto the screen. Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, partly filmed in a computing centre full of Bull machines with critic friends of the director in the white coats, won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1965. Pixar’s Luxo Jr. won a Silver Bear in 1987 and Tin Toy the Oscar for animated short film in 1989. The Academy’s separate Scientific and Technical Awards, given since 1931, went for decades to sound and film chemistry; computers appear from 1981, when Cinetron received a certificate for a computer system. Avid’s digital editing system won the top Award of Merit in 1999, Pixar’s RenderMan team received three statuettes in 2001, and SideFX’s Houdini won the Award of Merit in 2018.

Writers and Their Machines

The science-fiction writers who imagined computers also used them, sometimes early. Arthur C. Clarke, who had proposed geostationary relay satellites in 1945, received an HP 9100A programmable calculator from Hewlett-Packard in 1969. He wrote 2010: Odyssey Two (1982) on a microcomputer, and when Peter Hyams prepared the film, the studio gave both men Kaypro II computers with modems. From 16 September 1983 to 7 February 1984 Clarke in Colombo and Hyams in Los Angeles exchanged text files over the phone line, MGM paying the long-distance bills; the time difference meant each found the other’s reply waiting in the morning. The exchange came out in autumn 1984 as The Odyssey File, an early book made of electronic correspondence. Isaac Asimov, whose robot laws grew out of stories published between 1940 and 1950, appeared in Radio Shack’s computer advertisements in the early 1980s.

Stanisław Lem worked on paper. In The Magellanic Cloud, finished in Kraków in July 1955, he described “trions”, quartz crystals the size of a grain of sand that store the text of an encyclopedia, pictures and sound, readable on any television set from a central library. His essay collection Summa Technologiae (1964) introduced “phantomatics”, electronically supplied sense data that make the brain believe in a world that is not there, in the same year that Daniel F. Galouye’s Simulacron-3 told of a simulated city. Lem’s story “The Seventh Sally” later gave Will Wright one of the ideas behind SimCity.

German writers came at the subject from the side. Boy Lornsen, known for the children’s classic Robbi, Tobbi und das Fliewatüüt (1967), published Abakus an mini-Max in 1970: a transistorised computer in the top floor of a water tower at Brunsbüttel develops a fault and answers only in rhyming verse and drawings, and its thirteen-year-old friend decides to invent a computer small enough for a school bag. The bestselling novelist Johannes Mario Simmel, asked by the German Literature Archive in Marbach in 1987 whether he used a personal computer, answered that the very idea horrified him. His last novel, Liebe ist die letzte Brücke (1999), typed on a mechanical typewriter, made its hero a malware specialist and its villain a manager who tests a new virus by using it to release chlorine gas from a chemical plant, misdirect a particle accelerator and crash two airliners. Ludwig Dexheimer’s Das Automatenzeitalter (1930) appears to borrow its structure, a couple travelling a future world to see its wonders, from Paolo Mantegazza’s L’anno 3000 (1897); the uncut text was not published until 2004.

Dead End: The Hollywood Interface

Film needed computing to be visible, so it invented an entire fake interaction language: 3D flight through file systems, “zoom and enhance” on any photograph, furious two-handed typing as counter-hacking, progress bars on everything.

Why It Stayed Fiction

Some of it was even real, the 3D file browser in Jurassic Park (“It’s a Unix system! I know this!”) was fsn, an actual Silicon Graphics demo, but spatial 3D interfaces failed in practice for the same reason they looked good on camera: they maximize visible motion, while real users need minimal motion and dense information. Cinematic interfaces optimize for the spectator; usable interfaces optimize for the operator: Engelbart’s unglamorous mouse-and-text won because it wastes no effort on being watchable. “Enhance,” meanwhile, ran up against information theory (pixels that were never captured cannot be recovered) until deep-learning super-resolution made it partially real, forty years late and with invented detail the courtroom can’t trust.

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