Well said. It's amazing how often people dismiss computer visualization in media (< ~2005) as "unrealistic."

That's not the goal!

It's intended to be representative of the process of interacting with a computer, not the interface itself. At a time when most viewers had little or no first-hand experience with a computer.

If you showed a CLI then, maybe 1/20 people would understand it, and they'd be bored because they used it everyday at work.