History Trivia / Hackers

* IronyAsSheIsCast: Angelina Jolie later admitted that she didn't even know how to turn a computer on.

** The main characters talking very highly of the RISC architecture. The CISC vs RISC "battle" was mostly a marketing thing with some underlying technical meaning. It petered out in the late 90s, as CISC won convincingly in the desktop and server markets.

*** Dade did that ten years earlier. ''In TheEighties''. And he hit the market so hard the NYSE dropped four points across the board. Nowadays he'd be in Gitmo until his hair fell out. Or [[MyGreatestSecondChance working for the NSA, FBI,]] or some other [[TheMenInBlack special government agency]], using his powers [[TheyFightCrime with other collared hackers to fight cyber-criminals]].

* DawsonCasting: Although they were all playing high school students, Creator/JonnyLeeMiller was 23 at the time of filming, Creator/AngelinaJolie was 20 and Creator/MatthewLillard was 25. Only Jesse Bradford really fit the bill, being 16 at the time. Bonus points go to Laurence Mason (who played Lord Nikon), who was 31 at the movie's release, though Nikon has an apartment of his own, so he is shown to be at least a few years older than the others in his peer group.

* The ''Series/AgentsOfSHIELD'' character Quake, aka Daisy Johnson, was originally based on AJ's Kate Libby.

* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: This film (albeit with some unrealism that itself is a product of movie writers not really understanding what it is they're trying to tell a story about) portrays hackers at a time when they ''were'' a subculture, not well-understood by the broader populace as computers were not yet as ubiquitous as they are today (the Internet as we know it today was in its infancy, as well). As such, things like the importance placed on the "Hacker Manifesto", as an example, are products of the era when hackers felt themselves to be set apart from broader society in echoes of the 'generation gap' of the 1960s:
-->"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals."

** Creator/HeatherGraham, Creator/HilarySwank and Creator/LivTyler auditioned for Kate.

** The main characters talking very highly of the RISC architecture. The CISC vs RISC "battle" was mostly a marketing thing with some underlying technical meaning. It petered out in the late 90s, as RISC actually "won", but no one cared, and it became meaningless anyway. (FYI: virtually all chips are now RISC, though it often gets disguised under a layer of microcode), and is the architecture commonly used in a range of devices, including smartphones and tablet computers.

* DawsonCasting: Although they were all playing high school students, Creator/JonnyLeeMiller was 23 at the time of filming, Creator/AngelinaJolie was 20 and Creator/MatthewLillard was 25. Only Jesse Bradford really fit the bill, being 16 at the time.

** Heck, look at the plethora of public pay phones. Seen any one of those in two decades? (Hint: they were almost completely removed in the 2000s, though NYC has almost a quarter of the remaining total nowdays).

** The main characters talking very highly of the RISC architecture. The CISC vs RISC "battle" was mostly a marketing thing with some underlying technical meaning. It petered out in the late 90s, as RISC actually "won", but no one cared, and it became meaningless anyway. (FYI: virtually all chips are now RISC, though it often gets disguised under a layer of microcode).

** The characters are in ''awe'' of somebody's new, super-fast ''28.8b modem''. It's got an Active Matrix display too (haven't seen one of them on a LCD in, what, 20 years?). And a P6 chip - triple the speed of the Pentium!