I'm having trouble recalling which television show had an episode with a particular plot. It was probably on TV in the 1990s but could well have been a movie. Haven't had much luck googling and searching/reading episode summaries on IMDB.
Plot points I recall (vaguely; may be inaccurate but they stick in my mind):
- On a submarine, there is a laptop with software (perhaps referred to as a "virus") that threatens to kill a bunch of innocent people, possibly by launching nuclear missiles. At least, I'm fairly sure there was a submarine...
- Bad guy invents a software program to "translate English into Japanese automatically" (or possibly vice-versa).
- I recall this seeming far-fetched at the time (using Google Translate recently triggered this memory).
- It may have been late in the episode that the bad guy reveals his motivation; I think I mainly remember the ending.
- Bad guy becomes disgruntled after his employer pays him just a salary while they make millions.
- The crew of the submarine fakes a malfunction in the software causing it to target the submarine.
- The bad guy falls for this trick and tells one of the good guys (possibly the female lead) how to disable the software (some obscure keyboard shortcut like "control+alt+shift+F9").
I have done some detailed searching of these series (but haven't watched them... yet ;-):
- SeaQuest DSV - I thought it was this show but so far haven't found an episode with the stated plot. Even searched through online transcripts for all three seasons...
- JAG - I thought perhaps the submarine thing was making me think of SeaQuest and figured it might have been JAG. There seem to be a lot of seasons and episodes but I only watched a handful.
- Seven Days - I read through the episode summaries and checked a few plausible ones found on YouTube but nothing convincing.