In 1981, the WPA CBBS operated out of Las Vegas as a dial-out Atari 400 system that called selected users directly. The system is now referenced as Cperm inside the archive, but in its original form it was a fully interactive Bulletin Board System built long before the commercial internet, with its own in-world culture, hierarchy, and rules.
WPA/Cperm was structured as an underground market simulation. Using Atari BASIC and an MS-DOS capture workflow, the SysOp recorded live modem sessions onto five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks. Those sessions documented an online environment with tens of thousands of fictional “members” moving contraband, brokering deals, and navigating risk — all orchestrated through text, imagination, and code, and monitored by federal investigators once the fantasy overlapped with real-world concerns.
Two years later, in WarGames, audiences were introduced to WOPR: a military supercomputer running continuous simulations of global thermonuclear war. On screen, WOPR lives inside a sealed facility, crunching through scenarios, testing outcomes, and occasionally blurring the line between game and reality. Inside the Cperm narrative, WOPR is not a coincidence — it is a cinematic mirror of the earlier WPA system.
The reel on this page comes from the Cperm Cryptographic Movie Portal and shows how WPA’s design language, SysOp-driven sessions, and high-stakes fantasy crime simulations map directly onto the WOPR concept: a machine that never stops “playing”, an operator behind the curtain, and a hidden audience watching the consequences unfold. The content displayed at 300 baud sparked an FBI investigation. The WPA was operated by a minor. Why monitor instead of arrest?
What this reel highlights
- The 1981 Atari 400 dial-out WPA / CBBS system built around live modem calls to selected users.
- How SysOp-initiated sessions and fantasy crime markets foreshadow the continuous war-game simulations later branded as WOPR.
- Visual and structural parallels between WPA’s text-based control center and the film’s depiction of a sealed NORAD supercomputer.
- The broader Cperm position that key internetorigin history was embedded inside Hollywood narratives instead of being formally credited to the original system and its creator.
Through Cperm, the original disks, transcripts, and program code from WPA remain intact — a time-stamped record of the true machine behind the movie machine. “WOPR was WPA” is both a headline and a restoration: reconnecting a famous cinematic icon to the 1981 Las Vegas dial-out system that made it possible.