Wired has a pretty good article about the movie War Games, which is now 25 years old.
I think Ally Sheedy was my first movie star crush. I still crush on her when I see that movie! It's also funny to think about the state of the technology at the time, like 8" floppy disks and dot-matrix printers. Today we have iPhones. Crazy.
I just read that article before you posted this. I totally agree about the beauty of Ally Sheedy back then, but I always had a bigger crush on Jennifer Jason Leigh.
As for the level of tech back then, it's insane to see how much we can store and how fast computers are now. Then again, I was using 8" floppies in a COBOL/RPG class I took in 1997.
Scary, eh?
I was there for all of it...beginning with keypunch machines in the labs.
Best two stories:
Two girls cat fighting, scratching, pulling hair, because both wanted to use the same opened keypunch machine.
And the kid who ran his deck of cards through the card reader upside down and wondered if his printout would be upside down too.
Everyone was REALLY excited when we got our first LA-36 DecWriter hard copy terminal.