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Computers in sci-fi
For a branch of fiction that is seemingly obsessed with hardware and technology, sci-fi realy portrays computers anything like accurately. This list was inspired by a simlar list here, along with some of my own ideas.
Any computer that has gown enough to become self awhere and/or break it's programing can be easily defeated by providing it with contradictory data.
Really advanced computers emulate the sound of a teletype, while printing text to screen. In addition advanced computers make some sort of humming, buzzing, beeping noises.
Large panels of flashing lights and banks of open spool tape drives also show a technology so advanced it's gone retro.
Any virus, written on any machine, can infect any other machine, regardless of what operating system it runs. This is problaby due to the fact that in all films, every one uses a Mac (oh what a paradise that must be!)
Larger computers are faster!
Hero's are incapable of typing on a computer unless they say what they type out loud.
Inevitably when a computer becomes sentient it also becomes evil and apparently stupid, as the first thing is dose is to kill it's creator, thereby preventing any chance for future patches and instantly revealing it's intentions (world domination, of course!)
Finding, secret hidden files is as simple as typing "find all hidden secret files".
Alien computer systems can be completely understood in a few minutes by an passing hero. Likewise the rule about viruses applies here to.
Entire sub systems of space ship operating systems can be re-wirten in a few hours at most. This rewiring NEVER introduces bugs of any sort.
Every thing is connected to the Internet and all information is available from here as well. Hence any computer system connected to it can:-
Access banking and credit card details
Scratch and alter FBI and police records, including photographs
Control any CCTV camera and be able to recognize faces from it
Control the microwave oven in our house
Computers given a very difficult task to do will:-
Draw more power than normal
Make more beeping, buzzing or other sounds than is normal
and finally will problaby explode, taking all of the building/space ship/space station or even planet, with it!
Computer screens generally have the brightness turned up to full (and then some!) so that any text on screen can be seen on the faces of our hero's.
Encrypted data can be decrypted by any hero using nothing more than a laptop (almost always a Mac) in a few hours.
Passwords will be be guessed in two or at most three attempts.
Robots built by evil, world domaiting computers will always power down the moment that the computer is destroyed.
The science-fiction series "Lost in Space" (set in the year 1997) premiered on CBS in 1965.
"I never think of the future.
It comes soon enough."
-Albert Einstein
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