Now, I know computers have been around for a long long time. But my impressions of computers before the 90s were huge, bulky, as-tall-as-humans contraptions that were never really affordable to average people like what we have today.

I was born in the 80s, and I swear that I have only seen a personal computer for the first time in the early 1990s. And I only ever heard of a hacker in the late 1990s.

Apparently all these existed way back in the 1980s, or maybe even the late 70s, as shown in this movie called WarGames, released in 1983.

The premise really looked like it could come from the late 90s, apart from the Cold War references - An intelligent but underachieving computer whiz kid, Daivd, hacked into a system thinking it was one of the latest war computer games yet to be released by a computer company. An excited Davd proceeded to play the war game, taking on the role of the USSR and commanded submarines and fighter planes and even nuclear weapons to be released on parts of USA, the role with the computer took. Little did he know that he had actually hacked into the millitary's computer system called Joshua, and that he had in fact, unwittingly set the computer into preparing for an all out war with the USSR.

Here's an interesting part from the movie.

David discovers the code to break into what he thought was the gaming company's systems.


David realizes he had gotten himself into some really deep sh*t...


David gets caught, but manages to escape after he discovers something earth-shattering.


I believe this person had uploaded the whole movie onto Youtube, but you just gotta figure out the sequences of those clips cos they're not numbered. But from these few clips which I saw I think I've really gotten interested to watch the whole movie. Hacker from the 80s! I never knew these technologies were present by the 80s! I mean, there was even a part where David had changed his grades from the school's system - reminded me of the recent case where a JC student had hacked into the school's computer system just to find out what his friends' A Level grades were.

Man, my school was still using written report books and test papers in the 80s!