by mindslight on 3/26/25, 3:41 PM
>
When I make Patterson rewatch the scene, he’s all smiles and pride, though he does say they mistake “refresh rate” for clock rate.I always took this to be about the overall system (culminating in graphics) performance, as Dade continues "It's not just the chip. It has a PCI bus". And in the previous scene the dudes started off talking about the video capabilities, modem, etc. It really was a magical time where there were constant new advances across every single subsystem and peripheral.
by tracerbulletx on 3/28/25, 10:37 PM
I went to a showing of Hackers in 35MM in LA last year and the director said they envisioned the hacker scene as the modern Punk music scene where computers were the instruments of creativity, like their guitars. And this is why the movie is actually timeless. It got the actual core identity that makes hackers hackers. Another fun fact is that all of the shots of them navigating through the Gibson was shot practically with glass towers and projectors and putting the camera on a track which is pretty cool.
by mitchbob on 3/25/25, 9:47 PM
by ChrisArchitect on 3/26/25, 2:34 PM
A fun way to get people into the article making the Hackers reference, as a die hard fan of the film love to see it, but some of the takes are so out there. It wasn't "incredible" or "absurdly geeky". Anyone at the time paying attention to anything sort of "PC vs. Mac", Intel vs. Power PC etc would have heard of RISC chip developments. And it's not far-fetched to think the original writers picked up a copy of Wired or PC Magazine to notice a headline referring to it. Hardly some magical insight. Any of the geeks watching the film chuckled (or raged) at the tech references but you kinda expected to see some and of course being a hollywood film expected totally fantastical tech usage as well which the film, in all its charm, delivers in droves. Dunno what that comment on 'pronounciation' was either. Think the author either showing his age (where that falls in the gen-x-millennial-z spectrum not sure) or desire to write fiction stories rather than be a reporter, shrug.
by tetris11 on 3/26/25, 9:40 AM
The giddy writing really makes it difficult to read this. Anyone got a summary?
by remram on 3/26/25, 12:37 PM
> not just that the filmmakers knew what RISC architecture was. Or that Jolie pronounced it correctly (“risk”)
How else could you pronounce it?
by tucnak on 3/26/25, 6:09 AM
Hackers 1995-Never gets old
by musicale on 3/26/25, 4:22 AM
> ChatGPT made me do it. Write this story, I mean. Months ago, I asked it for a big hardware scoop that no other publication had. RISC-V, it suggested
> Who[m] should we thank? he [Patterson] asked. (Given that WIRED’s parent company has a deal with OpenAI that lets ChatGPT mine our content, we should thank old WIRED stories, among others.)
by musicale on 3/26/25, 4:18 AM
Doug Bowser seems safe at Nintendo, but Carol Surface left Apple.
I wish Calista Redmond all the best at RISC-V International.
by ksec on 3/26/25, 6:46 AM
Is this about RISC? Or RISC-V? I think many are confusing the two.
And if anything over the past 30 years have shown CISC won performance computing. That is everything from PC, Smartphone or all the way to server.
We need RISC for embedded and stay embedded.
Right tools for the right job. We need to stop the constant ideological / fashion / hype fighting in tech space and more good old fashioned proper engineering.
by theandrewbailey on 3/26/25, 12:49 PM
by phendrenad2 on 3/26/25, 6:16 AM
Please universe, let this be the last time Hackers is referenced in conjunction with RISC-V. Let RISC-V be free from the cringe of a terrible movie from 30 years ago.
by prepend on 3/28/25, 10:32 PM
That’s actually Acid Burn’s quote.
by celticninja on 3/25/25, 12:11 PM
funny first paragraph, then paywall