Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
It always baffles me how TV and movie producers/writers surely use computers-- but have no clue about they are used and about the interfaces. For instance, ever since The Matrix, everyone is convinced that computer programmers are perfectly comfortable to read their code as multiple vertical lines of text constantly raining down their monitors.
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Just to toss a monkey wrench in your story, I am a software engineer and regularly work on multi-application choreographies and protocols and my preferred way to visualize a full deployment is my development environment split 6 ways, each section showing the log out put for each piece of the system, scrolling by relatively quickly. The important thing is that errors are colored red, and also I've seen the same text so much that important bits just stand out regardless. It's kinda like the screens on the matrix though less data coming by at once. But hey, I'm not desperately trying to hack a huge computer network of evil robots or whatever.
Though unlike the matrix I can hit one button and "pause" everything if something really interesting comes up
What you see in the matrix isn't that far off. For one, they are viewing symbols which could mean anything, it's not just text. Also depending on the type of programming you do, you may be very accustomed to seeing data in matrix form (such as hex editors) though generally not moving.
If you visualize a small virtual machine it's easiest to represent it as a grid of states, and over time you learn what it means when certain points on the grid are set to certain characters/colors/blinking/etc. The matrix data display could be a flowing display of relevant state changes in different parts of the system. Though I imagine they would use more colors than just green.
So though the animation is a bit flashy, what's shown on the Matrix isn't quite as far fetched as some other shows. (I agree with your general sentiment though.) Also it's worth mentioning that in the second Matrix movie there is a scene where they hack into a computer in one of the big buildings and the screen on display
has a real hack in use for exploiting openssh insecurities. It was still relatively effective at the time of the movie's release.