framebuffer's bitslices

the net (1995)

image

I can't watch movies. I cannot recognise faces so I get lost pretty damn easily with characters. I have an attention span where every small external stimuli is a non-maskable interrupt. But this is one of the few movies I actually watched on it's entirety, several times, and I still love it.

I saw this movie probably 15 years ago, as a kid that was very into retro tech in the mid 2010s. Had just this recollection that it had so many old computers that I loved it, despite not caring about the plot.

Now, being 27, I watched it again. I know more about old computers. The renaissance of this era of computing is in full swing. More knowledge is public about the tooling, workflows and how they were used back then.

I now see it as a love letter of the 90's. I kinda wanna delve deeper, maybe even do some kind of video essay on this topic. There's so many details that are actually closer to being accurate, yet it falls into the same movie tropes that break that immersion if you know what they're doing.

If you like 90's retro tech, I recommend this snapshot of 1995's "dramatized 2h-long Computer Chronicles film"

Edit: wrong location on description.