Sneakers

When Martin (Robert Redford) and Cosmo (Sir Ben Kingsley) attempt their initial prank at the beginning of the movie, the façade building seen is the famous Hill Valley clock tower from the Back to the Future (1985) trilogy.

Professor Len Adleman is one of the three mathematicians who invented the RSA (he's the "A") cryptosystem, currently the preeminent method of encrypting any form of data in the world. Adleman served as a mathematical consultant on this movie, and spent several days constructing the slides Janek (Donal Logue) displays at the college symposium on "unbreakable codes" (which took Adleman a considerable amount of time to create using primitive early 1990s computer graphics technology). In the end, writer and director Phil Alden Robinson had the slides transposed as oil crayon scribbles, on account of the notion that "That's what a regular mathematician would have done." Adleman later remarked that this was indeed true, and what he would have done, and would have saved him days if only he'd known.

While picking through Dr. Brandes' (Stephen Tobolowsky's) trash, Mother (Dan Aykroyd) holds up a folded box of "Cap'n Crunch". In the 1970s, "Cap'n Crunch" came with a small whistle in the box. A "phone phreaker" called "Captain Crunch" (John Draper) discovered that this whistle could be used to get free phone calls (one of many components in the practice of "phone phreaking", which digital phone switching-systems has made almost totally obsolete). There is another reference to Draper during the Scrabble game (the word "CRUNCH" is visible upside down before it gets turned into SCRUNCHY). Also, Cosmo (Sir Ben Kingsley) tells Martin (Robert Redford) that, while in prison, he helped some Mafia men to make some "free telephone calls." Whistler (David Strathairn) is patterned after Joe Engressia, a blind telephone expert born with perfect pitch who was one of the original phone phreakers.

Bernard Abbott (James Earl Jones) was named after Robert Abbott, a charismatic Technical Consultant for this movie. In addition to being about the same age and complexion as Jones, Bob designed the first time-sharing (multi-user) operating system for the Control Data Corporation CDC-6600, the predecessor of the Cray Y-MP seen in the movie. He is also often referred to as the "Father of Information Security" by seasoned veterans of the computing industry.

The computer in the room off of Cosmo's (Sir Ben Kingsley's) office in the PlayTronics building (the one that looks like a circular bench) is actually a Cray Y-MP, a multi-million dollar supercomputer that was one of the worlds fastest computers at the time this movie was made.