Personal computing emerged in the 1980s as something Hollywood couldn't ignore, with films like "Tron, " about a hacker who gets trapped in a computer game, and 1983's "WarGames, " about a nerdy high school student who nearly causes a nuclear apocalypse after breaking into a military-operated computer network.
"WarGames" director John Badham also worried that people would eventually tire of watching Matthew Broderick reading aloud from a screen, so he pushed Mr. Parkes and his co-screenwriter Lawrence Lasker to devise a way to make the computer talk, like HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey, " even though no such technology existed at the time.