Ok, The Social Network isn’t a new movie by any means at this time, but I happened to see it the other day. I’ll leave the entire story and whatever facts or not it did or didn’t portrait in a correct manner.
But I did spot the use of several at least basic technical terms used in the beginning that struck me as amazingly correctly used! The movie character Mark actually used wget to download images (at about 10:05 into the movie), and as you can see on my first screenshot the initial keystrokes we get to see on the command line also actually resembles a correct wget command line. You can click on these images to get a slightly larger version of the pics. I’m sorry I couldn’t get any higher quality ones, but I figure the point is still the same!
After having invoked wget, as is explained he gets many pictures downloaded and what do you know, the screen output actually looks like it could’ve been a wget that has downloaded a couple of files:
He also mentioned the terms ‘Apache’, ’emacs’ and ‘perl scripts’ in complete and correct sentences.
Where is the world heading?!
Update: Hrvoje Niksic, the founder of wget, helped out with some additional observations:
The options looked right to me, something like -r -A.jpg …
I was wondering about the historical accuracy of the progress bar, but it checks out. The movie takes place about a year and a half after the release of Wget 1.8, which added the feature. The department that takes care of these things did a good job. 🙂
Yes, I noticed that too! I was very pleased to see a movie where some actual research was done wrt computing.
IIRC he continues to rip some other sites, and you can see him writing a Perl script.
Too bad though that there aren’t much other mentionings in the movie (apart from that scene where they’re trying to hack some Python(?) server).
If the movie is to be believed, Mark wrote Facebook in Emacs. I’d love to hear the story of how he was able to write an entire webapp with the crappy text editor that awesome OS proides.
Emacs; It’s an awesome OS, but it’s text editor sucks.
@John: you’ve chosen a funny place to bash Emacs.
I’ve been an Emacs user for 20 years and I’ve produced an extensive amount of open source (and proprietary software) using it. I’d claim emacs makes you very productive when you’re on friendly terms with it.
I can’t really tell how serious you are in that message, but I find editor wars rather boring…
I was surprised that KDE looks much like it looked on my desktop in 2003.
Actually, that part of the movie script heavily quotes Zuckerbergs original Livejournal posts of the time (actually, only the more “dirty” bits are inserted, the technical stuff is quoted almost literally 🙂 ). The original blog is no longer online, but the posts can be found in other places.
Still nice that they cared for some authenticity (at least in those scenes…).
Watching the movie now. I do get the feeling that they were “deliberately namedropping”. Look at us! We’re talking geek stuff, because geeks are an important part of our target demographic for this movie. See, geeks? We mentioned wget, and emacs, and Apache, and PHP! We get you guys, see? We’re hip, right? 😉