andrew@garfield.UUCP (Andrew Draskoy) (07/05/83)
I've been reading all the reviews of Wargames in this newsgroup, and it seems that most of the complaints are about the little technical points that they messed up in the movie. But I have also seen sensible reasoning used by people to explain them away. The worst one, which seems to be one of the worst, is the idea that WOPR asked only for a "LOGON", and no password. I watched for this and saw no reason to believe that this is so. Joshua had no password, but this was a "back-door" and was probably not subject to normal protocol. The only other person we saw try to login was McKittrick, but at that stage WOPR had destroyed the password file, so we don't know that it wouldn't have asked him for a password. It seems that if you weren't allowed in, you got told right away, before a password was asked for. UNIX may ask you anyway, but all systems don't have to. The only technical thing that bothered me was the display on the kid's terminal that continued changing after he was disconnected.
grw@fortune.UUCP (07/08/83)
Actually, the second time I saw wargames, I watched the
display that continued after the modem was hung up closely
(dangling modifier, I know. Sue me). It is not the kid's
terminal, it is the WOPR display, that continues playing
after the hangup.
Yet another one explained away,
-Glennrcj@burl.UUCP (07/11/83)
Some other things need to be considered here. One of the complaints that I have heard is that the kid is talking over a modem to his school computer at what looks like about 9600 baud. Sure that is impossible, but do you want to (or did the director want the audience to have to) sit there while he does what he did at 300 (MAYBE 1200) baud??? I don't think that it detracts from the movie one bit to help keep the action moving with a small inaccuracy like that. As for the comment about Falken owning the island and yet the ferry stopped there -- who said that he owned the whole island?? He made his cryptic little comment about "About face, down path, open gate, through gate, close gate, ..." or something like that; but that did not indicate to me that he owned the WHOLE island. Come on, folks, give a halfway decent movie a break and confine your blazes to Superman III and the like, -- The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3814 (Cornet 291) alias: Curtis Jackson ...![ floyd sb1 mhuxv ]!burl!rcj