Verity is the pseudonym of a programmer based in the UK. She can be contacted at [email protected].
It's an adolescent game; what Tom Lehrer might call "kicking fiction while it is down." I can't watch King Kong without marveling at the folly of the natives of Kong's island, the Konganistas as it were, who took the trouble to build a wall sufficiently long and high as to isolate themselves from the great ape, but were foolish enough to include a door big enough to admit him. A geographical analysis shows that the climatic flood at the end of George Eliot's weepy The Mill on the Floss, far from sweeping away the eponymous mill, would in reality scarcely have wet the heroine's shoes. In that Sherlock Holmes fave The Hound of the Baskervilles, why does the murderer bother training his dog to attack Sir Henry Baskerville when he could just shoot his victim and chuck the body into the bog? You get the idea. So can we make our own petty expertise to spoil some computer-oriented fiction? You bet.
Beginning with Mr. Francis
Let's start at the top. Dick Francis's 1980s thriller Twice Shy is unusually realistic. The plot deals with a program that predicts the outcome of horse races. There is sensible discussion of the problems of maintaining an application, the unreliability of tape as a backup medium, and porting between platforms. Mr. Francis even offers us a few lines of code from The Program, including this:
560 IF I < P THEN 730: I5 = 40</p>
Whoops. For those too young to be acquainted with line-numbered Basic, I'll render the fragment as indented pseudocode:
If I < P then<br>
Goto line 730<br>
I5 = 40<br>
End If</p>
Perhaps I5's usefulness atrophied during the writing of the program, which would explain why nobody ever noticed that it didn't get to 40.
But Dick Francis is very atypical: a writer who actually troubles to do some research. Software-in-fiction, especially film and TV science fiction, can be divided into two main eras.
Enter the Paradox
In the conundrum era, the way the goodies defeated a bad computer, or indeed the baddies sabotaged the goodies' computer, was to give it a paradox. Ask a pre-1975 machine the old chestnut about who shaves the barber in Seville, and smoke would soon drift upwards from its twitching reel-to-reel tape drive, and the hero would be hard pressed to leg it through suspiciously similar corridors before the whole place went up in flames. I seem to recall that Robbie the Robot, an early portable, was laid low by this method; using this stratagem, Spock and the original Treksters overcame a planet-ruling mainframe. This convention was so well established that when I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, I didn't believe that merely unplugging HAL's RAM chips would suffice to tame him. Right through the rather boring end sequence, I was waiting for Keir Dullea to repel a final attack with: "If the first thing I say is a lie, and the last thing I say is the truth..."
In the 1970s, people began receiving utility bills for £999,999,996.32 and it became harder to sustain the myth of the infallible electronic brain. In 1974, a certain good Doctor encountered a minicomputer — in retrospect something about it makes me think "IBM System 34" — that wished to fill abandoned Welsh coal mines with giant maggots. (Don't ask.) This machine was one of the first TV computers to acquire riddle immunity, and the Doc was obliged to beat a temporary undignified retreat. IBM had added the ON CONUNDRUM JUMP statement to RPG, and the universe would never be the same again.
Backdoor to Anarchy
After this, there was a period of anarchy when there was no proper standard for overcoming fictional computers. For a brief time, the "backdoor" security hole was in favour, as in the movie War Games. (This flick also featured the first use on film of an ergonomic menu structure with seven items or fewer per menu: "0-Exit, 1-Chess, 2-Backgammon, 3-Thermo nuclear war.") But the "backdoor" plot device never really stood much chance, as it was soon well established that a sun-starved youth, "scripted kiddie" if you like, could hack his way into any system by typing fast and uttering the magic words, "Uh-oh, it's encrypted. This may take a few minutes." Something better had to be invented.
Death by Virus
My earliest "second era" recollection, and I admit I can't remember the name of the TV show, was in about 1985. It established the general pattern for computer virus infection that is followed to this day. The viruses arrived on the targeted computers as C source code (yes, well spotted) that scrolled past very rapidly for a while before the display gave out. Viruses signaled a happy return to the convention that crippled computers gave off smoke/melted/blew up in their death throes.
Once it had been discovered, this technique spread among hard-pressed scriptwriters like, well, a virus. For example: a 1990s Japanese TV show Gridman: Hyper-Agent Vs. Computer Virus Monsters ran the idea into the ground — just in its title. Honorary mentions too for another cartoon called ReBoot, which featured viruses called "Megabyte" and "Hexadecimal," and Hackers, which featured a pre-Lara Croft Angelina Jolie as "Acid Burn." (The Lara Croft film, of course, had nothing to do with this genre, although the line "Uh-oh, it's Sanskrit. This may take a few minutes" seemed familiar.)
These are my favourite fictional software nonsenses. Spend a few minutes with like-minded friends, and I'm sure you can supply even dafter examples. But don't trouble me with them now. I'm up all hours, shoring up the conundrum resistance in our database server. It's taken to crashing during the overnight update, ever since somebody told it the FD's salary. Ha-di-ho.
DDJ
