Abstract
Today is a typical day. Waking up is difficult because you had a very long day yesterday, and worked well into the evening. At least you have a beautiful view this morning, as the rising sun glints off the Jemez Mountains. Drinking your government-issued coffee with your breakfast, you decided that this will be a two-cup morning, because today is going to be a long one, too. Walking from your home to work means a stop at the security checkpoint. After showing the guard your credentials, you walk to your building in the secure area, then to your desk, where you will sit, along with row after row after row of other women with similar desks, spending the day doing mathematical calculations.
The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.
Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext.
It’s a UNIX system! I know this!
Lex, Jurassic Park (1993).
We’re in!
Nearly every movie with a computer network in it, ever.
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Notes
- 1.
Which are actually the outer rim of a volcanic caldera 26 miles across. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Daniel London) references this in an early episode of Manhattan, “This country, the Valle Caldera, they call it a desert, but it’s a crematorium. The mesas are only the fallout from a volcano that exploded a million and a half years ago. Someday it will detonate again, and everything you see will be buried. It’s just a question of time. There are forces beyond our control. The United States Army is one of them.”
- 2.
The Mentats from the novel (1965) and film (1984) Dune were a form of human computer that came into being after thinking machines were banned.
- 3.
A FLOP is a “floating point operation per second”; a teraFLOP is a trillion of those.
- 4.
The accuracy of the Norden bombsight was so high (in principle) that for the first time it allowed pinpoint high-altitude bombing of an individual target—like a ship or a factory—rather than inefficient area bombing that may or may not destroy or even damage a target. In combat use, the accuracy was dramatically lower than in tests—this has been attributed to variables such as bombardier error, cloud cover, and previously-unknown atmospheric effects (the bombsite was built upon the premise that the wind speed was the same from the ground up to the aircraft). The development effort had a level of secrecy that rivaled that of the Manhattan Project.
- 5.
Charles Babbage came very close with his designs for the so-called Analytical Engine in the early nineteenth century, but both his funding and the precision with which gears could be made at the time were insufficient for the task. However, in the 1990 novel, The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling imagined an alternate history where Babbage got his machine up and running. The book is pretty much the genesis event for the Steampunk subgenre.
- 6.
Recently, there’s been some dispute about exactly which month ENIAC was first modified to run stored programs, which could give it priority over the Manchester Baby, but the Baby was designed from the start to use stored programs.
- 7.
The visual effects, themselves, are a product of computation these days. How meta.
- 8.
Such computer characters have become more interesting on the big screen in the last few years due to the relative rise of cinematic artificial intelligences that take leading roles without being obsessed with destruction or domination, such as in Her (2013) or Ex Machina (2015). In this, the movies are finally catching up with small screen, as benign A.I. characters have long been part of the TV landscape. Examples include KITT from Knight Rider (1982–1986), Holly from Red Dwarf (1988–), and Rommie from Gene Rodenberry’s Andromeda (2000–2005). All that said, Robby the Robot from the 1956 theatrical film Forbidden Planet deserves a shout out.
- 9.
The celebrated mathematician John Von Neumann didn’t invent the architecture that bears his name, at least not entirely; that honor probably belongs to Charles Babbage. Babbage’s designs for his never-built, but nonetheless influential, mechanical computer (the Analytical Engine) employ a similar approach, albeit one implemented with cogwheels rather than circuits.
- 10.
Mathematician, logician, philosopher, and chemist Charles Sanders Pierce made this same discovery over thirty years earlier in 1880, but did not publish his work. Silly Charles.
- 11.
Just like in The Martian! The Martian is great. Have you seen it yet? You should.
- 12.
To maintain consistency with the nomenclature using bits and bytes, four bits, or a half-byte, are often collectively called a nybble.
- 13.
If the most-significant-bit is used to indicate the number’s sign (the standard scheme for so-called signed numbers), then one byte can store positive and negative numbers ranging from +127 to −128.
- 14.
Nevertheless, there was a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode entitled “11001001”.
- 15.
Technically, real ASCII only uses seven bits in actuality, but an 8-bit version that originated in the 1980s, which includes some non-English characters like é and ü, is very common. Twenty-first century computers encode text using the UTF-8 standard, which can handle every type of alphabet or symbol on the planet, including Chinese, Japanese, and even emoji. Thanks to some terribly clever software design, UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII.
- 16.
Technically, a universal Turing machine is defined as having access to an infinite amount of memory, something no real computer has. But real computers have access to large enough memory stores as to make this point moot for most purposes.
- 17.
Go watch The Imitation Game (2014) if you haven’t already. Many historical details are fictionalized, but it does get across many of the important ideas in Turing’s application of early digital technology to cryptography.
- 18.
This is actually the fundamental basis for cloud computing, which lets companies like Amazon and Google conjure up and rent out virtual servers on an as-needed basis to people who want more processing power than they can afford to own physically, and have each server behave as if it is an actual machine with a processor, disk drive, memory, software, and so on.
- 19.
Today, you can play with an ENIAC on your desk or lap, and even program it: there are several free ENIAC simulators available online.
- 20.
Weik, Martin H. (1955). Ballistic Research Laboratories Report No. 971: A Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems. Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD: United States Department of Commerce Office of Technical Services. p. 41.
- 21.
See “How Europe Missed the Transistor,” by Michael Riordan, IEEE Spectrum, November 2005.
- 22.
The Greenwood, Archer, and Pine Street Band—later shortened to GAP Band—released the single “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” in 1982. The song made it to #31 on the Billboard Hot 100.
- 23.
Yes, we’ve made better jokes, but you try coming up with a joke incorporating a popular 1970s band and solid state physics.
- 24.
That model we’ve all seen countless times, like between scenes on The Big Bang Theory.
- 25.
Just like planets, an electron that is bound to an atom has negative total energy, while one that is unbound has positive energy. Although we have explored this a little in Vol. 1, we’ll go into more detail in Chap. 8. If this doesn’t make sense, it might after you’ve read that chapter.
- 26.
The degree of care required in semiconductor manufacturing is a major factor in the design of modern microprocessor plants—called fabs—which cost about $5 billion apiece to build.
- 27.
Hey look, we did it again!
- 28.
We’re describing a bipolar transistor here. These are very commonly found as separate components on circuit boards. They’re the things that look like little squared-off black cylinders with three leads—see Fig. 5.5. They were used in early computers, but in integrated circuits the most common type of transistor is something called a FET, or field-effect transistor. FETs work in a somewhat different way to bipolar transistors, but from a logic point of view, they are pretty much the same. It would not be an exaggeration to say that modern civilization is built on the backs of trillions of FETs.
- 29.
Technically, here we’re describing the operation of transistors at saturation. But unless you’re designing analog circuits, you don’t need to worry about that.
- 30.
Technically, they are said to be used in saturation in digital circuits. Saturation is bad if you’re trying to listen to an analog audio signal, as it would be horribly distorted.
- 31.
These so-called blinkenlights were intended to provide diagnostic information about the computers and the programs running on them. An experienced operator could tell at a glance from the patterns if a computer was stuck in an infinite loop, for example. The descendants of mainframe blinkenlights can still be found on modern computers, such as the lights that flash on cable modems or Ethernet sockets.
- 32.
The Univac predicted the winner correctly on both occasions, but the network ignored the computer’s results in 1952, because they thought the computer’s prediction that Eisenhower would win in a landslide was laughable. He won 39 out of the 48 states then making up the United States.
- 33.
The movie has a plot line that has become more on-point with time, rather than less, as white-collar workers fear their jobs will be eliminated thanks to digital automation.
- 34.
Some systems use so-called inverse logic, where a positive voltage means 0 and no voltage means a 1, but the principle is the same.
- 35.
We’ve eliminated some of the components, chiefly resistors, you would need if you were actually going to build this as a working circuit.
- 36.
Engineers had embraced transistors, but hated the introduction of the IC, feeling they were being asked to trust too much in a literal black box they couldn’t open. It wasn’t really until the Apollo Moon Landing, which relied on digital computers to fly the spacecraft, that the last mutterings faded.
- 37.
It’s really hard to understate the influence of the Apollo Guidance Computer on computing technology, especially the way it kickstarted Moore’s law. See Further Reading for more details.
- 38.
This is pretty much the exact same scenario that occurred with the birth of the Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers. For $35, you can get a Pi that has better specs than many desktop PCs of 10 years ago.
- 39.
Congratulations! Welcome to one of those rare occasions where saying “reverse the polarity” isn’t complete BS technobabble.
- 40.
Computers have long stopped using ferromagnetic core memory, but their ghost lives on in modern operating systems. Unix coders who have a program crash will often get the error message “Segmentation fault (core dumped),” which means a copy of the computer’s working memory has been made and stored in a file so that the programmer can analyze what went wrong.
- 41.
ARM and Intel respectively.
- 42.
Though compilers do exist for many interpreted languages, they’re still often run by an interpreter.
- 43.
Not well known in the U.S., the BBC Micro was an amazing computer created to improve computer literacy in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. It’s also the direct computational ancestor of the ARM computers now found in roughly 95% of the world’s smartphones.
- 44.
The showrunner for Futurama, David X. Cohen, has a B.A. degree in physics from UC Berkeley, and an M.S. in computer science from Harvard. Is it any wonder the show was so smart? On the other hand, under the category of “You do what you have to do to break into the Industry,” two of his first produced scripts were for Beavis and Butthead.
- 45.
For the eagle-eyed and technically inclined among you, you’ll notice that the 6502 is a Little Endian machine. For the non-technically and less eagle-eyed among you, see the explanation of Big and Little Endian in the main chapter.
- 46.
Which is how Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak became ultra, mega, and very rich, respectively.
- 47.
No, Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet—but, as Internet pioneers like Vint Cerf will happily admit, Gore did play a critical role in bringing forward legislation that allowed the relatively small, and largely closed, ARPANET to transform into the publicly accessible Internet, and the legislation also provided the funding for the Mosaic browser that brought the World Wide Web into the mainstream. Technological success isn’t always about technical things.
- 48.
Invented by Tim Berners Lee at CERN in 1990, but which owes a debt to Ted Nelson’s before-its-time work on hypertext in the 1960s.
- 49.
Everybody has heard by now that the HAL computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey got his name because HAL is simply the letters IBM shifted once… Of course everybody is wrong—at least according to those who knew director Stanley Kubrick. Those close to Kubrick swear it was just coincidence.
- 50.
A symmetric system called ROT13 was in common use in the days just prior to the World Wide Web (when it was more modem-based and most people used a sort of bulletin board system called USENET). Encrypt each letter by shifting it 13 places, wrapping around from A back to Z, and you have very simple way to encode ciphertext. This method was never used to secure information, but rather on text that contained elements like questionable language or movie spoilers, so if the reader went to the trouble of decoding it, presumably they could not complain about the content. Part of the title of this section is ROT13ed.
- 51.
The breaking of the Enigma machine has inspired many books and movies. Of the latter, The Imitation Game is probably the best of the lot, but to really understand many of the subtleties involved, you should check some of the titles listed in the Further Reading section at the end of this book.
- 52.
Many video games have embedded within them cheat codes—unlikely keystroke or action sequences which yield a prize, a bonus video sequence, or skip over a particularly difficult boss. The cribs were the cryptographic equivalent of cheat codes.
- 53.
As alluded to earlier, technically this rule doesn’t always apply to short messages. There are still some brief Enigma messages intercepted during World War II that haven’t been cracked, for example. This is because with a short message, many possible “solutions” can be found that produce equally likely plaintext, e.g. the cryptotext MDFIOAZNRUDF could be ATTACKATDAWN or RETREATTOBAY. In a longer message, inconsistencies and gibberish can be used to eliminate false solutions.
- 54.
If you wrote a 4096-bit number using conventional decimal notation, it would have over a thousand digits.
- 55.
Currently, there are some signs that, for silicon-based circuits at least, Moore’s Law may be starting to run out of steam, but there’s a lot of interest in keeping things going by building processors out of alternative materials such as graphene.
- 56.
To see how absurd trying to restrict encryption can be, this is a program in the Perl computer language that implements a complete factorization-based cipher system known as RSA:
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
For a while in the 1990s—despite the fact that the math underlying it was known worldwide—it was legal to print up T-shirts with this program on it and sell them in the U.S., but illegal to export the very same T-shirt outside the U.S. under the same laws that prohibit the sale of, say, guided missile parts to North Korea (Code from http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa ).
- 57.
“‘WarGames’ and Cybersecurity’s Debt to a Hollywood Hack,” Fred Kaplin, The New York Times, February 19, 2016.
- 58.
A difficult one, as well. The very best systems of today can master a particular variant of Texas Hold’em, but more complex versions of Poker still defy comprehensive solution.
- 59.
When it comes to international spying, other options to get into protected systems include bribing or blackmailing operators in foreign embassies, or planting bugs that can register keystrokes in their code terminals, either electronically or for listening to the slightly different sounds different keys make when struck.
- 60.
If you ever want to see a social engineering tour de force, come to the biannual Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York City organized by 2600 magazine. At a packed session of the conference, 2600s editor-in-chief, Emmanuel Goldstein (a pen name taken from the protagonist of Orwell’s 1984) calls up various businesses in front of a live audience and convinces people to give him information they really shouldn’t. The conference organizers have gotten pretty handy at muting the volume when luckless souls at the other end of the line start reading out things like customer credit card numbers.
- 61.
Social engineering was the main tactics in famous hacker Kevin Mitnick’s toolbox. He once found a collection of unused bus transfer slips in a dumpster adjacent to the bus company’s garage, and was able to ride Los Angeles MTA buses for free.
- 62.
If you didn’t read the Science Box: “Of Bits and Bytes and Bases” calling 4C a number might be freaking you out a little bit? We recommend you read the box, but if you don’t then know that every such hexadecimal number can be converted into a regular decimal number, in this case 76.
- 63.
Hang on! Why did the 54 come before the 6A, and not after, to make memory address 6A54, or 27,220 in decimal? Because in this example, the computer is Little Endian, meaning the least significant byte comes first. Computers that put the most significant byte first are called Big Endian. These are actual computer science terms.
- 64.
Whaling takes this to another level—it’s when the phishing attack targets high-level executives, celebrities, or politicians into divulging sensitive information.
- 65.
As this was being written, a ransomware attack took ticketing machines for the city of San Francisco’s light rail system—including the famed cable cars—offline on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, which is one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Beginning the night before, the screens of all ticketing agents displayed, “You Hacked, ALL Data Encrypted.” The attackers demanded roughly $73,000 in ransom in the form of 100 Bitcoins. Rather than shut down, The San Francisco MTA simply let passengers ride free.
- 66.
Impossible in 1983 that is. Today a bunch of teens could absolutely put together a system with a bunch of cheap computers and cameras that could do facial recognition and much more, and it wouldn’t take up most of a room either.
- 67.
If anyone knows of an earlier screen representation of a DOS attack on a computer system, please let us know through our Hollyweird Science Facebook page!
- 68.
Or other personal AIs. Jibo is like Rosie from The Jetsons, but insanely cute in a Pixar sort of way.
- 69.
PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction, and it is a method used to generate thousands to millions of copies of a DNA sequence. Apparently PCR machines, and other devices like laboratory equipment and traffic lights, have simple communications protocols, and little in the way of security, so that manufacturers can make software updates/upgrades easily. Often the login is “guest” and the password is something like “1234”, with many corporations counseling end users against changing these settings. Sometimes the passwords are even hard-coded into the machines. This often makes network-connected devices, as opposed to full-blown computers, tempting targets for hackers to co-opt for DDOS attacks.
- 70.
- 71.
Based on Vigen’s website: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- 72.
Now we’re getting into the land of Minority Report.
- 73.
At some point, habits become so ingrained that they become automatic, and require little conscious thought. Neuroscientists call this chunking. So a goal of this type of marketing is to get shoppers to chunk shopping at their store.
- 74.
- 75.
- 76.
In his autobiography, iWoz, Wozniak says that the elegant digital circuit design of this blue box is probably “cleverer than anything” else he’s done in his entire career!
- 77.
In this age of cellular phones and unlimited calling it’s hard to remember, but there was a time when calling someone outside your own area code was pretty pricey.
- 78.
One magazine, now ezine, catering to this community is entitled Phrak. We are unsure if there is a rival zine being published entitled Phelgercarb.
- 79.
Of course, in the cat-and-mouse game that is international cyber espionage and cyberwarfare, one country’s white hat hacker may be another’s black hat.
- 80.
- 81.
Some studios and execs still do.
- 82.
Sorry, you do not get royalties or points towards WGA membership.
- 83.
Sort of like a horror version of Ex Machina.
- 84.
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Grazier, K.R., Cass, S. (2017). Let’s Get Digital: Computers in Cinema. In: Hollyweird Science: The Next Generation. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54215-7_5
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