One of my favorite bits of trivia about the 1983 movie WarGames is that all the computer typing scenes have been faked in a clever way: The actors (many of whom might have never typed before, as home computers were only slowly becoming popular) were allowed to press any key they wanted, but the interface would still proceed as if the correct letter was typed.

This allowed the computer to respond to keystrokes, making it all feel real, but also reduced the burden on actors to type things properly – and also make it easier for proper sight lines to happen, as the actors didn’t have to constantly look at the keyboard.

WarGames used it really well, showing all sorts of face reflections in the CRT screens, as if people literally talked to the machines, which must have been hell to film:

I have never seen this demoed or mentioned outside of the anecdote. However, yesterday, Cathode Ray Dude released an excellent video about the challenges of filming computer screens. The whole video is worth watching, although at this point mostly off-topic for this blog. But starting at 1:32 and ending around 1:37, there’s an actual demo of a similar piece of auto-typing software used in the 1996 movie Scream:

You might think this is just a piece of old-computer trivia, but I’ve actually used that in at least two of my talks, for some of the similar reasons! I run most of my talks from HTML/CSS/JS; it’s nice for the audience to see things being typed and responding properly to (audible, and occasionally visible) key presses – but it’s also nice as a speaker not to worry about messing things up under pressure.

For extra realism, make sure Backspace goes back in the script – you might occasionally press it instinctively – and for extra extra verisimilitude, actually bake in a typo or two into the predefined sequence. (And an escape hatch if you actually change your mind and want to go manual.)

Then, of course, there’s a classic 2011 piece of software called HackerTyper. Did someone already marry this idea with an LLM? Seems like a logical next step.