I consider myself to be a geek/nerd. When I watch any movie/tv series I get excited when they show someone’s computer desktop, which happens quite often for my choice of the movies. Most of the time it’s a fake/made up stuff, trying to show “hackerish” stuff, way overloaded GUI, or they open a Windows CMD and type some commands like “tree”, so for a non techy person it looks cool & authentic hacking.
But what excites me is when the they actually showing real-life scenarios on those computer screens. TV series “Mr.Robot” had a lot of them, real shell commands, real Linux distros such as Kali Linux.
So, few days ago I decided to watch movie called “BlackBerry (2023)” – The story of the meteoric rise and catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone. At the beginning of the movie the scenes takes you to around mid 90’s, about a small company which later grew into huge one known as “Blackberry”. In some scenes (mid 90’s era) they showed people working on their desktops and I was surprised & excited when I saw IRC on it! One of the office geeks was chatting on IRC, you are able to see the channels messages & nicklist, even make out what’s being said.
Pretty funny that people in IRC channel were talking about light beer, and someone mentioned “Bud light Platinum”, which actually was released in 2012! Far far away from the scene, which suppose to take place in the 1996!
I’m pretty sure the client used was mIRC, since it had default mIRC font. It’s also being used in full screen mode on purpose, I’m pretty sure to hide the OS taskbar.
It’s funny that these few seconds of the movie are completely unnoticed for 99.98% of the people who watched it, but for me & other geeks it was a smile worth scene!


