Review of Office Space (1999) by Donald W — 29 Jun 2014
Anyone who has worked in an office filled with cubicles or is a computer programmer or software engineer needs to see this movie. The comedy hits way to close to home. There are also some jabs at the fancy strip mall restaurants that cater to the lunch crowd from the local office workers.
The plot line is based on a real incident that took place in the 1960's with IBM's original banking software. Some computer programmer wrote some software that stripped fractions of a cent off each interest calculation and put it in his account.
He got away with it for years until he had to retire. When he fixed the software the bank's profits shot up and when they did an investigation as to why, he turned himself in. I also heard that some little old lady called the bank to complain that her savings account was off by one penny.
That was done back when computers were as big as several refrigerators and where housed in the basements of large buildings with expensive cooling systems. Back then computer programmers worked by themselves with little supervision.
The running joke in this movie is that computer programmers today are micromanaged. The management philosophy today is that computer programmers should follow a standard process and not be allowed to program in an ad hoc fashion with no pear reviews.
The equipment in this movie is outdated now. They still used CRT monitors and most of the screen displays were from an old Apple Macintosh. And I mean the original Macintosh. In one scene the main character is trying to shutdown his computer and leave before his boss asks him to work on Saturday.
When his computer finally shuts down all the Mac windows a Microsoft DOS prompt appears on the screen with a green C:>. I'll bet Apple paid them to use Macintosh computers.
This review of Office Space (1999) was written by Donald W on 29 Jun 2014.
Office Space has generally received very positive reviews.
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