Was "War Games" based on real-life?

On 26 Sep 2002, Eric Smith wrote: The scanning (a.k.a. "war-dialing") was very real. The speed with which the calls connected was not (less than a second between dialing and ringing...back in those days ESS was not widely deployed, maybe a few large cities had some ESS switches, but the whole country was still connected by mainly clunky analog trunking and long distance calls just did not go through that quickly). The part where he fools a payphone into giving him a dialtone by shorting the mouthpiece to the phone was a scene stolen out of reality. I'm sure Ma Bell loved that one. In the old days, when you put a coin into a payphone, the coin would actually be the object that grounded the telephone line by causing a short, which would result in the CO providing a dialtone (all payphones work on "ground-start" lines). That trick still worked years later, but only on local calls (since toll and long distance calls went through the AT&T ACTS computer for billing). I don't know if it still works, but my guess is "probably not". The scenes where he is "talking" to the computer: complete fantasy ;) I wish we AI that good even today. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *