Modems in the Movies: The Early Years

In this scene from the 1983 thriller Brainstorm, researcher Michael Brace (played by Christopher Walken) dials in to a mainframe at a factory that makes computer parts, and directs its robots to go berserk, destroying the lab. Meanwhile, his estranged wife and fellow researcher uses another line to hack in to the security systems at the factory and reprogram them to lock the labs and thwart the guards inside. Pretty sophisticated for 1983, no?

Later in Brainstorm, Brace pairs an ordinary pay phone with his portable acoustic coupler and dials in to corporate servers to run a program called "Brainstorm." In this movie, a brainstorm is a highly dangerous, full-sensory recording of someone's death. The person who "listens" to the recording (via special headgear) sees and feels the pain of dying, and everything that happens afterward. The military goons in the movie want to use "Brainstorm" as a mental torture tool.

In the iconic geek movie War Games, a young Matthew Broderick plays David Lightman, a hacker who uses his modem to discover a backdoor into a classified defense network. Lightman soon realizes that the military supercomputer he has infiltrated, which is programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war, has confused reality with gameplay and that the simulation he has started could start World War III. Disaster is ultimately averted, and Broderick lives on to dial up further modem hijinks in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

In this campy '80s techsploitation flick, young architect Miles buys a souped-up computer he knows nothing about. After a series of unfortunate events--including spilling champagne on the hardware--the computer gains self-awareness. Edgar, the PC, eventually develops human emotions, and puts its modem to use as it cancels its owner's credit cards and vies for the affections of his girlfriend.

The early Val Kilmer vehicle Real Genius features a comical climactic sequence in which supernerd Chris Knight (Kilmer) brute-forces his way into the military's defense network to stop the government from using his grad-school laser project as a deadly weapon. Which forces us to ask: What exactly did he think they would do with it? Make popcorn?

While trying to create the perfect girlfriend from a combination of a Barbie doll and a computer, teen geeks Gary Wallace (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt Donnelly (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) decide to hack in to the government network (which, if earlier '80s flicks are any indication, is very easy to do) to get more power. We're not convinced that the writers knew how modems worked.

In yet another great geeky appearance from teen star Matthew Broderick, the movie's namesake uses the computer that his parents bought him to hack in to his school's network and change his attendance record before spending the day on the town with his love interest.

By the mid 1990s, the Internet had become a staple of tech-savvvy American life. The Net, featuring Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, coupled fear of Big Brother and the rise of the Internet. While on vacation, Angela stumbles into a web of corporate espionage, and the Internet soon becomes her worst enemy.

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