What program is Neo using?

Question

In Neo's apartment in the movie The Matrix (1999) we can see a program on the monitor. The program is constantly searching something. What does it search for and is this program real?

In general, computer programs seen in Hollywood movies or TVs are not real, but are simply visual elements designed to look like a computer program. They’re digital props. (Of course, there are exceptions, and you do see ubiquitous software packages like Windows or Linux or Google Chrome and so on in movies, but in general if you see a computer program running in a movie or TV show, it’s usually a digital prop, rather than a real piece of software.) — HopelessN00b, Feb 02 '19 at 03:08
Also, because of the fact that you need to precisely synchronize the framerate of the monitor with the shutter of the camera, otherwise you get nasty flickering and rolling effects, it is often easier to just leave the monitor off and copy in some graphics later. — Jörg W Mittag, Feb 02 '19 at 03:15
See also on [softwarerecs.se]: Search tool that shows/scrolls the documents it searches (like the tool from The Matrix) — unor, Feb 02 '19 at 08:06

score 25 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 01 '19 at 16:55

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Based on the first words we can read during this scene, Neo is searching online papers for Morpheus.

The first time we get a good look at the computer screen, we can read 'Searching...' as part of the used software, and the large header 'Global Search', before it scrolls to 'Morpheus eludes Police at Heathrow Airport'. The last entry we see has the caption '******** (Morpheus?) International Manhunt Underway'.

The picture of Morpheus is actually superimposed (as can be easily seen in the video): it can either be a saved result, or a search parameter.

The algorithm is searching globally: the first characters, barely visible, are Chinese, the second search result is in English, the third is from An-Nahar, a "leading Arabic-language daily newspaper published in Lebanon", and later on it's browsing 'The Courier Press'.

As for whether it is an existing program or not, sources are hard to be found, leading me to believe it is not an existing program. This would make sense, since Neo is an accomplished hacker, "guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for" (as agent Smith phrases it), who might want to skip the user-friendly GUI's of established operating systems.
A similar question is on Fantasy SE, here, and the bottomline is that if this software were existing, it was probably well-documented.

Nevertheless, the monospace font can be identified as (very similar to) OCR Extended:

^{Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nahar

https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/Room_101}

answered Feb 01 '19 at 16:55

Joachim

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I would not describe this application as "skip[ing] the user friendly GUIs." lol. Building a UI that flashes images by like that would be net work for very little benefit. But artistic license, I suppose. – jpmc26 Feb 01 '19 at 19:50
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Given the varying languages, I would say it's most likely he's searching for the image itself. Perhaps it's the only known photo of Morpheus, so any related articles would use it, and only it. – Omegacron Feb 01 '19 at 20:10
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Actually quite weird. There was not that much info online in '99 as I remember and pulling it in and processing it with a PC would have been hair-raisingly slow and expensive. Better to visit the archive of newspapers (What would "the two Kevins" have used? Nothing; they would have picked up the phone to perform social engineering or would have performed dumpster diving). But the pic is my new wallpaper. – David Tonhofer Feb 01 '19 at 20:55
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I have yet to see any movie show an accurate depiction of software development or "hacking", but such a depiction would make for a very boring movie. Few programmers would go to trouble of putting in all the flashy graphics and animations you see in movies, but they sure are a lot more exciting to watch! – Seth R Feb 01 '19 at 22:49
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@DavidTonhofer, ah, but all the newspapers were inside the Matrix anyway, so technically ALL of that info was online. ;) – Wildcard Feb 02 '19 at 00:06
To avoid misunderstandings: the linked Sci-Fi & Fantasy SE question is about a different tool than this question here. ··· I asked for this (or a similar tool) on Software Recommendations SE, but there doesn’t seem to be a close match: Search tool that shows/scrolls the documents it searches (like the tool from The Matrix) – unor Feb 02 '19 at 08:05
@DavidTonhofer Many newspapers were online by 1999, and nothing we see would be terribly expensive (just mildly unrealistic for the sake of visual interest). If anything, the relative lack of content back then makes the "slow and expensive" part less of a factor. – hobbs Feb 02 '19 at 09:52
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@SethR one coding scene in "the social network" sounded very realistic. With bash, emacs, wget, grep, apache and php if I remember correctly. – Eric Duminil Feb 02 '19 at 15:50
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We have to keep in mind that this movie came out about six months after Google was founded. I don't know how many here are old enough to remember, but there was absolutely no such software around at the time. The lucky ones might have had a backbone internet connection through a university at a couple of MBps, but anyone in a crappy apartment like Neo's would be lucky to have 56k or maybe a 128k ISDN line. Pulling and searching mass raster scans of newspapers like that would have taken days or months of download and compute time. There just wasn't anything like that around at all. – J... Feb 02 '19 at 18:57
Well, there were search engines like AltaVista and Lycos. And there were sites where they used 1 and 2-bit gifs for images like those in the shown results. Obviously the search engines weren't laid out like that, but it wasn't infeasible. Just a year later I got a residential 768Kb/sec DSL line and a friend got cable internet at a blazing 1Mb/second. And we were out in the suburbs. The apartments downtown probably got cable internet the year before. So not impossible, though obviously the program shown is made to look cooler than it actually was back then. – user1118321 Feb 02 '19 at 23:24
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A case of Viewer-Friendly Interface, that's what. – Tobia Tesan Feb 03 '19 at 09:39
@SethR in the sequel Trinity uses nmap and ssh to hack into a power plant and also used a known exploit from the time. There's a scene in Tron Legacy where they use ps, grep, and kill to stop a process (I don't think they were hacking into something though). There's probably more examples but those come to mind. Those movies as a whole don't present things realistically but the scenes are a nice touch. Much better than "It's a Unix System, I know this!!!" (But even that scene from Jurassic Park was using a real but not widely used 3d file manager tool!) – Captain Man Feb 04 '19 at 15:08
@user1118321 There were search engines, but the sum total of accessible digitized information was absolutely tiny. If Neo wanted to look through newspapers in 1998 he'd have been doing it on microfilm at a library - that level of digital information was simply not available. – J... Feb 04 '19 at 17:52

score 9 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 04 '20 at 15:16

The matrix script simply describes it as a search engine.

The DARKNESS CRACKLES with phosphorescent energy, the word "searching" blazing in around us as we EMERGE FROM a computer screen.

The screen flickers with windowing data as a search engine runs with a steady relentless rhythm.

I would assume it was not a real bit of software but something created for the film to appear like it is searching.

As for what Neo is searching for, the script doesn't say but we could guess, based on the events that follow, it is performing a task for a client or crawling the internet for either Morpheus or The Matrix. My reasoning for the latter is what Neo and Trinity talk about when they meet.

TRINITY I know because I was once looking for the same thing, but when he found me he told me I wasn't really looking for him. I was looking for an answer.

There is a hypnotic quality to her voice and Neo feels the words, like a drug, seeping into him.

TRINITY It's the question that drives us, the question that brought you here. You know the question just as I did.

NEO What is the Matrix?

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 01 '19 at 16:23

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It can only be assumed he's doing port scans to find computers with open ports so he can hack into them. Despite that fact that the film was released in 1999, due to the sets it's difficult to determine if the film is actually set in 1999. He appears to be using Nmap to port scan, and at one point Trinity is trying to get an exit and she is definitely using Nmap to communicate with Tank.

It should be noted that any scenes where you see Matrix code (i.e. the green characters falling down the screen), that is definitely not legitimate code. That's all computer generated and a custom font meant to resemble Kanji.

answered Feb 01 '19 at 16:23

Johnny Bones

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Well, technically it's set hundreds of years after 1999. But within the matrix, it is 1999. – Acccumulation Feb 01 '19 at 19:38
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@Acccumulation Maybe Neo found an unfiltered port into a Real-World archive full of material about In-Matrix Player Characters and didn't know what he had? – David Tonhofer Feb 01 '19 at 21:09
@DavidTonhofer write it up! I'm looking forward to watching it in a few years... ;-) – uhoh Feb 02 '19 at 23:54

What program is Neo using?

3 Answers3