2001 documentary portraying hackers from different origins and cultural backgrounds in Germany, Holland, Italy and the USA, providing insight into the ethics and motivation of the hacker scene. Part of the film was shot at the event ‘Hackers at Large’ (HAL) in Holland.
In the mid 1980s, Square Enix entered the Japanese video game industry with simple RPGs, racing games, and platformers for Nintendo’s Famicom Disk System. Though a couple of games were successful in North America, most were not popular and the company faced bankruptcy.
In 1987, Square designer Hironobu Sakaguchi headed development of a game to prevent the company’s financial ruin. Sakaguchi chose to create a new fantasy role-playing game for the cartridge-based NES, and drew inspiration from popular fantasy games: Enix’s Dragon Quest, Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda, and Origin Systems’s Ultima series.
The story behind the fiendishly addictive game, a tale of high stakes, intimidation and legal feuds set against the backdrop of Cold War tensions between East and West.
The documentary also explores the rivalaries between Nintendo and Atari and the paradox of buying software rights from a country that doesn’t believe in property, much less intellectual property.
1999 film based on the book, ‘Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer’ by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It is a made-for-television docudrama written and directed by Martyn Burke which documents the rise of the home computer through the rivalry between Apple Computer and Microsoft. The film stars Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates and Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs.
Revealing the daily battle between the Internet’s outlaws and the hackers who oppose them by warding off system attacks, training IT professionals and police officers, and watching cyberspace for signs of imminent infowar.
Through interviews with frontline personnel from the Department of Defense, NYPD’s computer crime squad, private detective firm Kroll Associates, X-Force Threat Analysis Service, and several notorious crackers, the programme provides penetrating insights into the millions of hack attacks that occur annually in the U.S.
As the best-selling gaming console of its time, the NES helped revitalize the US video game industry following the video game crash of 1983, and set the standard for subsequent consoles in everything from game design to controller layout. In most of Asia, including Japan (where it was first launched in 1983), it was released as the Family Computer, commonly abbreviated as the Famicom, or FC for short.
Film tracing the history of Linux, from its early days as a hobby project of Linus Torvalds’s, through its rapid rise in popularity and number of users, to the dot-com boom and bust, and beyond.
In 1991, 20-year old Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer science student, sends a posting to an Internet newsgroup asking for advice on how to make a better operating system. His project is a hobby, he says, and would never become ‘big and professional’. But in ten years he and his loose alliance of hackers all over the world creates an operating system – Linux – that challenges Windows 2000 for the server market and is now poised to dominate the next generation of handheld and desktop computers.
The final part of this 3-part series covers the rise of the graphical user interface. Steve Jobs, having viewed a demonstration of Xerox’s Star graphical user interface, developed a desktop manager for the Macintosh with an icon-based interface modeled on the Star.
The Apple Macintosh pioneered many of the features now standard in the PC, particularly ease of use. However, the Macintosh was considerable more expensive, so it was rapidly overtaken by the IBM PC, with some pundits not only saying that IBM had won, but also that Apple could potentially go out of business.
This episode looks at the rise of the IBM PC, and also Compaq’s successful attempt to reverse-engineer its underlying technology, which led to many competitors producing IBM-clones that undercut IBM’s own offering. While IBM was one of the key companies that fostered the growth of the PC industry and initially dominated it, by 1990 it had lost its lead.
Microsoft had originally profited from the initial success of the IBM PC. It did even better with the proliferation of clones as IBM’s own market share shrunk, so Microsoft saw no business sense in following IBM’s lead. Microsoft saw more potential in developing Windows, a project they pursued parallel to their cooperating with IBM on OS/2, and Windows 3.0 proved to be a great success (along with MS-DOS) bundled with new PCs. This led to the split between the two titans, with Microsoft setting the standard for PCs, while IBM concentrated on its mainframe and services businesses.
Documentary chronicling the rise of the personal computer/home computer and software industry beginning in the 1970s with the Altair 8800, Apple I and Apple II and VisiCalc.
This episode covers Tim Paterson’s development of 86-DOS largely from duplicating Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system. Microsoft purchased all rights to 86-DOS from Paterson’s employer SCP for $50,000 shortly before the release of the IBM PC. Microsoft’s resulting MS-DOS was an operating system that could run on any 8086-family computer.
Legendary inventor Clive Sinclair battles it out with ex-employee Chris Curry, founder of Acorn Computers, for dominance in the fledgling market.
The rivalry comes to a head when the BBC announce their Computer Literacy Project, with the stated aim of putting a micro in every school in Britain. When Acorn wins the contract, Sinclair is furious, and determines to outsell the BBC Micro with his ZX Spectrum micro.
Documentary telling the story of silicon chip inventor Robert Noyce, godfather of the modern digital age.
Re-living the heady days of Silicon Valley’s seminal start-ups, the film tells how Noyce also founded Intel, the company now manufacturing more than 80 percent of the microprocessors in today’s personal computers.
