- > It is unclear how Jurassic Park crew got their hands on a Motorola Envoy
The head of frogdesign (Hartmut Esslinger) ended up running into Spielberg on a plane and showed it to him. The one in the movie is an original mockup.
Source: https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/jurassic-park-tablet-d...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752261
- IMO this is the social internet at its best. Pretty obscure question answered relatively quickly with answer and source.
- AI immediately gives me the same answer. I can’t tell if I like this easy access to detail or lament the growing irrelevance of “social internet” for these kinds of things.
It reminds me of pre-phone disagreements among pals. You’d argue and argue and maybe eventually agree to disagree. Today someone just looks up the trivia and it’s all over.
- Of course, the only reason AI knows about it is because one human posted it online because they wanted to share a good story with another human
- In the early days of the smart phone, I had heard it referred to as the Bar Bet Settler 5000. It was pulled out of one's pocket and with its web browser one would use Google's search page to find information to settle the bet. Then, those smart phones got infected with social media apps and the Bar Bet Settler 5000 went the way of the dodo.
- > AI immediately gives me the same answer.
"The search engine found the answer too" is not an interesting response.
- I don't know if I'm unique in this, but I find myself asking people I know about things that I know I can easily lookup faster. At this point it's more a social ritual than actual information gathering.
- same here, but only when it feels like good conversation or is a subject we already discuss. Especially if youre in the same room, then it can become a little trivia game and if no one knows then someone can look it up
related note, my girlfriend is bilingual with spanish, and i only have some old high school classes of spanish to go off of, so whenever she texts me a word i dont recognize i ask her what it means. Aside from helping me understand, she gets a peek into my literacy level (which is admittedly pretty low), i can call out the word when its used again, and i get the impression she likes teaching me these little things.
extending the lesson beyond our little ritual, when you ask another person for the information it goes beyond being useful to each other. it is a bid for connection, and a display that you trust them and their opinion/knowledge on the subject.
- It's just like we evolved to be social creatures!
- As more people offload their search/mental effort to LLM’s and fewer people take the time to answer these obscure questions, unfortunately we will simply lose the fun portion while making LLM’s incapable of answering them. So good news is you don’t have to make a decision!
- Thanks, I am going to update the article!
- Life finds a way
- Thank you! What a beautiful and appropriate meta comment!
- >part of Capgemini Invent
rip
- > Some code associated with Nedryland is visible on screen. It looks like actual source code[9] with Classic Mac OS API functions calls
The source code shown is example code included with the Macintosh Programmers Workshop, Apple's original IDE for the Mac. Originally sold as a separate product, eventually it was provided on the Developer CDs and then as a free online download as serious developers had moved to CodeWarrior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer's_Worksho...
One of the windows shows the example for how to make a HyperCard XCMD and the other one looks like an MPW script for using Apple's Projector source control.
edit: Found the files in question in a copy of MPW 3.1. Line endings have been converted from CR to LF and the character set from MacOS Roman to UTF-8 to display easily in modern browsers
MPW 3.1:Examples:HyperXExamples:Reduce.p https://kalleboo.com/linked/Reduce.p.txt
MPW 3.1:Examples:Examples:CheckOutActive https://kalleboo.com/linked/CheckOutActive.txt
MPW 3.1:Examples:Examples:DerezPict https://kalleboo.com/linked/DerezPict.txt
- My wife worked for Thinking Machines back then. I remember that they'd asked Cray to loan them a supercomputer for the film because that's the computer used in the book. Cray brushed them off, so they turned to Thinking Machines who were happy to do it.
To thank them, the producers rented a theater in Cambridge, MA to screen the film just for Thinking Machines and I was also able to attend. By far the biggest reactions from the audience that night were when the CM-5 was shown for the first time and then when the young actress says, "It's a Unix system. I know this"
- “It’s a Unix system. I know this.” was definitely the line from the movie most quoted in online spaces in the 90s.
- I wonder how many sysadmin or adjacent careers that scene helped to foster.
As a kid JP was a favorite of mine, and eventually I got into Linux as an older teen.
That sequence cemented Unix as this mythical thing in my mind and I knew I had to know more. I eventually got to work on AIX in my first sysadmin role which was great. I leaned more into Linux, but it had a positive effect on my IT career.
- I still quote this line at work all the time. Basically whenever anyone asks me if I know how to do something on the computer
- This is such a cool anecdote. I have added it to the page!
- The line at my workplace was "It's a Unix system... WE'RE SCREWED!"
- That’s amazing! I live next to their former office. Do you know which theater they rented out?
- It was a long time ago so I can't say for certain, but she and I both remember it being the Kendall Sq. cinema.
- My uncle (John Monsour) worked on this movie as the “24 Frame Computer Sync Engineer”. Because film cameras and CRT monitors have different frame rates, you needed to use specialized electronics to synchronize them with the camera frame rate otherwise you would have banding and weird moving artifacts on all the screens. It’s crazy to imagine needing to do this for all the screens visible in these shots.
Later monitor technologies like LCDs don’t have this issue because they don’t have the same moving electron beam illuminating each line of pixels, and it also became cheaper to just replace all the computer screens with CG, so eventually this specialized technical work wasn’t needed anymore, and my uncle ended up doing other things on the movies he worked on.
- What a cool anecdote. I have added it to the article!
- If anyone is curious about 24fps CRT displays on set, I loved this [2 hour] video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qicQUvSUbPM
- I absolutely knew who made this video before clicking on the link too
- How was the syncing actually achieved?
- You want to look into genlock[1]. Tldr, everything that needs to be synchronized (at least your video outputs and your camera; possibly lights and audio recording) needs to accept a clock input from a centralized clock to signal the start of vblank. Maybe one device can generate it, and the others follow.
It's conceptually easy, but I'm sure there's lots of technical issues. Some devices might need slightly earlier or later timing of their pulse. Many devices don't accept a genlock input from the factory, and might need to be modified or substitited. In this case, all the video screens were controlled from outside the room, so they would have picked genlockable devices.
There's a lot of details around the time the shutter is open and the time the image takes to draw... You would need to do a lot of test shots to find what works best.
- It was indeed a Thinking Machines CM-5 — Nedry actually mentioned them in his line about how Hammond wouldn't be able to find anyone "anybody who can network 8 connection machines".
An actual assembled CM-5 actually cost closer to a million dollars.
But, from what I remember the one in the control room is a shell. In the CM-1 and CM-2, the LEDs were actual status indicators on the processors, which Tamiko Theil and the other designers had the engineers move to be at the edge of the boards, so that they'd shine through the case. Super cool.
But by the CM-5, they were run off a simple microcontroller.
They went bust not long after this movie.
I made a YouTube video on the history of the Connection Machine – it was a lot of work, and if you're interested in this sort of thing I think you'll enjoy it:
- I had no idea Thinking Machine was a brand! I just thought they were "thinking machine super computers" another way of saying "artificial intelligence super computers" or "machine learning" (dunno if ML was around then :shrug:)
- Then you're going to love learning that Feynman worked on them, specifically the inter-processor routing.
https://longnow.org/ideas/richard-feynman-and-the-connection...
- What a gem of an article. I don't know physics, I use computer for my work and nothing beyond, but reading about the mindset of an actual scientist is really interesting.
- It’s a real classic. An amazing article super worth reading (and re-reading if it’s been a while) and almost infinitely quotable.
- Great video. I visited Brewster Kahle at Thinking Machines back when I was in college and that visit ended up being one of the major influences in my career. The CM was way ahead of it's time.
Thinking Machines also pioneered WAIS which was a precursor to modern search engines.
- Thank you! My biggest regret in the video is I didn't get to touch on Brewster Kahle's involvement – especially given what he's gone on to do with Internet Archive. Would love to do a followup.
Re: Search Engines, I think I mention this in the video but apparently Sergey Brin was part of the Connection Machine user community, and had that experience on his resume. (A copy of that is still floating around.)
- Also, the indoor park "tour" voiceover refers to "Thinking Machine supercomputers", which I never figured were a brand name until today!
- Thinking Machines: "We are building a machine that will be proud of us."
- Do you think it's coincidence the chip for Skynet looks so much like the Connection Machine?
- Probably not! I'd imagine that whoever did production design for the movie would have visited some of the labs of the time, or talked to people involved in AI – and the CM-1 / CM-2 were very much at the forefront of that type of computing back then.
But that's such a great find – I've seen T2 many times, but that visual of the black hypercube-looking design really is strikingly similar!
- It’s so lame they changed the LEDs to meaning nothing.
- I'd heard from my wife who worked at TMs that they did this so engineers would stop "wasting" time programming animations on those lights.
- On the upside, this means you can run the LED boards without the rest of the CM-5. Have one panel that still works.
- I'd love to be able to add 1U or 2U of blinkenlights to my rack, even if the pattern was completely random.
- The funniest part about this thing is that it seems to have had roughly the same performance of a modern day CM5 (the Raspberry kind).
- What a great post! I would love to read more of these for other films.
> Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers. > ... > - Cory Faucher (Special Effects Coordinator)
This sentiment seems to run throughout the movie, and I believe it's why it's held up so well in terms of visuals, I don't think it would have aged nearly as well as it has if more CGI (or other ways of "faking" things) had been been used.
As for the question (in <references[9]>):
> Some code associated with Nedryland is visible on screen. It looks like actual source code[9] with Classic Mac OS API functions calls.
That looks like old Pascal, and since the window has MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop) in the title, that's probably it?
- What a respectful view of the audience. Too bad this approach was replicated what feels like approximately 0 times after it.
- A lot of it came from Creighton. He always researched the technical details of his books to a deep level, and in fact he was also a successful computer programmer, winning an Academy Award for some scheduling software he worked on (and author, and medic and screenwriter!).
What's great is he self-identified as a hacker.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n2/26_Michael_Cri...
> Although he does not consider himself an expert programmer or serious hacker, Crichton is in favor of hacking and the people who do it. He explains: "It's perfectly OK for a movie director to eat and sleep movies and to have no other interest in life--that's Stephen Spielberg. He's applauded for it; he's lionized. It's fine for a symphony conductor to have no other interest than music, or for a painter to live to paint. So why isn't it OK for a person who loves computers to be totally wrapped up in computers?
"I think the answer is that it is OK. I like hacking. I think the most boring thing in the world is to sit down with a bunch of flowcharts and think everything out before you start programming."
- > ... "Creighton" ...
Do you mean Michael Crichton, the author of the original book?
- Surely. The name is pronounced like Creighton.
- The name rhymes with "frighten".
Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/crich...
Also a Source: Name is Scottish origin, I live in Scotland.
- Also a source: back in the '90s, I once resolved a disagreement with a friend over the pronunciation of the man's name by emailing him to ask, and "Crichton rhymes with 'frighten'" was his exact answer.
- I mixed up German and English pronunciation of "ei". The German one sounds like English "i", so it would be Crighton.
- Yes, my mistake!
- An academy award for software?
- Thanks for the link, and boy is that a whopper. Do my eyes deceive me or is there literally a shot of the computer looking at them from its computery perspective, through its screen, with some layer of visual digital artifacts over it at the 14 second mark?
- What about Jurassic Park 2? Never saw it
- "audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers"
It's funny they say this back in 1993. It feels like we've gone from computers being a niche but beloved piece of tech to a ubiquitous and reviled piece of tech.
- I feel like I'm picking up on more intentional or if not, lore-compatible, examples of John Hammond's "spare no expense" going towards as much the illusion of control as any actual innovations/control.
Are they columns in the building load-bearing? You know, the ones with giant chunks chipped out to be more aesthetic and look like fossil digging work.
Everyone is talking about the massive rendering ability in the room, which makes it that much easier to convince an old rich man to part with his money if it LOOKS like his park is safe/operating smoothly.
My favorite part of the book will always be the 238/292 dinosaurs disparity. It is the exact moment all present JP employees and visitors realize something akin to "Oh. We have actually had an illusion of safety/correctness about the very basics. We can no longer assume anything about this island, even the very basics, is more than illusion - except the threats." At no point after stepping on this island is anyone not in danger.
- Spielberg masterfully turned the 238/292 into the visual/explanation of the egg. I don't remember if the book has the "why" so much as the "at what scale" of the reality. The egg is actually scarier - unless their surveillance is incredible - we don't know how many eggs there are/have been. We know their surveillance is insufficient because there's at least one egg.
- > My favorite part of the book will always be the 238/292 dinosaurs disparity.
This and the scene where they realize they've been running on backup power the whole time are both fantastic
- When I watched Jurassic Park when it came out, I got so enamored with the computers in the movie, especially the SGI, that I adjusted the looks of our DOS GUI library[1] so it would look more like it. (I had already a liking to OSF/Motif then)
- This looks really nice, I also have a weird love for this kinds of GUI's. Windows 95/98 & CDE are my thing, and I really miss it.
- There's always NsCDE which should run on modern Linux. Haven't tried it myself.
- We just watched this movie last night (as a tribute to Sam Neill). I loved all the SGI hardware. Although the Irix FSN file explorer scene made me cring. It was excurciating watching Lex navigate. On that era of hardware, midnight commander would have been my jam. (or honestly `ls` just like it is now). I did love seeing Dennis pounding on that Apple ADB keyboard (even though there was no way that'd be hooked to an SGI Indy unless he did serious work). Just for giggles, I hit up eBay to see what a Quadra 700 was going for. Wait, WHAT??? 1500 - 2500 USD??? For an antique that will do nothing all that useful? Wow. Wish I still had my Macintosh SE that I could sell to put my kid through college....
- So... Realistically fsn makes for a killer visual for audiences, "this computer is SOOO advanced it has a 3d interface" and here is someone doing something technical with it.
But if we take it at face value, immersed in the cinematic world they are building. Some young wanna be hacker, knows a little more than the average joe about computers. and when all the adults in the room are afraid to even look at the system, steps up to see what it is about. We have all been there. And stumbles on this 3d thing(perhaps needry enjoyed the demo and left a link on the desktop) but the names are familiar, it is the same as the sun system at the university you can telnet into. "Hey this is unix, I know this! now where would the the start park script be?"
Basically me "Hey my mac is not working right, you like computers can you fix it?" starts sweating, having never touched a mac in my life "S.S.Sure" Click around a bit find the terminal "Hey this is unix, I know this!"
As an aside I bought an sgi in the early 2000s ($300 for a $30000 doller computer, what a steal), I suspect largely due to Michael Crichton books and was tickled pink to find out the "This is unix, I know this!" One of the stupider in a long list of stupid hollywood interfaces was actually a real thing.
I need to find out what the matrix used, it smells like motif on the worst passive matrix(wait a minute) lcd screen you have ever seen in your life.
- I re-read the book recently and it was really fun to read about the tech now. The descriptions of how difficult it was to build a database that could handle storing 3bil base pairs, which is trivia now. Probably the most sci-fi part of the book, they had image recognition tech so advanced it could track individual dinosaurs from arbitrary video angles alone.
Also, Nedry got absolutely shafted by Hammond in the book. Nedry describing the difficultly in building a complex system with minimal requirements had me sympathizing, lol.
- Crichton was frighteningly good as a prognosticator and futurist. Certainly for a writer with a medical degree. He fought the good fight, trying to inculcate caution. Most of his books (even from the seventies) hold up surprisingly well until the early 2000s. They got a bit weird by 2006. But then so did our ideas of future tech.
- He even wrote a non fictional book on Personal Computers back in 1983 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Life
- All the cool kids were writing those.
https://archive.org/details/herbert-barnard-1980-without-me-...
- On the other hand he also did a ‘climate change is fake’ book (state of fear).
- That was a really, really bad book. By that time it feels like he was a shadow of his former page-turning self.
- yeah, not one of his best. not his worst, but not great.
- It was kind of scary how prescient Jurassic Park was. Just swap genetics for AI and his warnings are incredibly applicable to modern times.
- Much like his earlier work Westworld which was also scarily prescient for modern times.
> These are highly complicated pieces of equipment. Almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases, they have been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work.
- or The Andromeda Strain. I was on the edge of my seat for the last half of the movie as a 10 year old when it came out. The book still holds up as a medical mystery - thriller and warning of unintended consequences.
- That’s an amazing connection, had no idea they were written by the same person but the underlying theme is pretty consistent.
- Dolly, the cloned sheep. That was huge in the news.
- One of the greatest "bad" writers. On my top ten.
- I still remember one of the characters in the book being awestruck by the number of Cray supercomputers the park had, and certain this must mean they were doing something really, really significant
Even by the time of the film regular consumer hardware had reached parity. Now we use more power to run to do list apps
- I work as a film prop master so this is fun to read and imagine my work being celebrated 30 years down the line. The art department will often lean heavily on me for tech-related set pieces because I have a CS degree. This article is a testament to the fantastic work of production designer Rick Carter, set decorator Jackie Carr, and prop master Jerry Moss.
- The control room in Jurassic Park was honestly beautiful - and something about those shaving cream cans really crystallized the aesthetic for me, weirdly. I had no idea that it was taken so seriously, I just remember thinking "damn, that's actually pretty realistic" when I re-watched the movie a few years ago.
- > This machine specs reminds me of how awful '90s laptop screens, based on a passive matrix, were. Definitely something I don't miss from that era.
While the 1991 Apple PowerBook 100 did have a passive matrix display, the machine it was based on, the Macintosh Portable from 1989, had a crisp active matrix running at 640×400 (even higher resolution than the compact Macintosh desktops with 512×342).
Interestingly Apple tasked Sony with designing the PowerBook 100 by taking the Macintosh Portable and slimming it down as much as possible. They shaved over 10lbs by moving away from the lead acid battery, dropping the floppy drive, and moving to a passive matrix display.
- My family owned a Mac Portable (the backlit model). Running Word for Mac 5.1, it was a fantastic writing machine.
- How am I only now seeing that Nedry's SGI monitor had a picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer on it with a scrawled message, "Beginning of Baby Boom"?
What an oddly specific Easter egg.
- Also, SGI keyboards never used ADB. Indigo-era SGIs used a mini-DIN keyboard/mouse, but it was proprietary. They were PS/2 starting with the Indigo2 and Indy.
- Thank you, I double checked in the SGI hardware developer handbook and it looks like you were correct.
Do you know if I can find a better source than that to confirm?
- These links show the pinout:
https://hardware.majix.org/computers/sgi/keyboards.shtml https://hardware.majix.org/computers/sgi.pi/keyboard.shtml
And the keyboard(7) man page actually has full details on the protocol (Indigo uses the mini DIN-6): https://github.com/jtsiomb/sgikbd/blob/master/doc/sgi_man7_k...
- I think Fabien is misinterpreting the part which he sees as "video conferencing." Nedry is talking to a guy on a regular phone line. He's just watching a security camera feed from the dock where the guy is.
- I am ambivalent about this. When I watch the sequence it looks like the guy in the harbor looks at the camera?
- A clone of fsn, fsv (File System Visualizer) is available and works on modern Linux.
Quite a fun little tool to visualise your storage.
- "There is a continuity error in the movie. See how the stack of PLI is facing left in this early shot."
It occurs to me that Arnold would be likely to turn these to face him when sitting at Nedry's desk (unless we see a shot of him going to sit and they already face forward). It'd obviously be part of the review of undoing Nedry's lockout to see if the backups are working (if I understand the point of the machines).
- I was five years old when I saw this movie and it blew my mind and now work in tech and read Hacker News for deepest of the deep dives into nonsense like this. So yeah, I devoured this entire article. Thanks!
- It feels like 1990s movies were the heaviest on computers/gadgets. Jurassic Park has a programmer as a main character, GoldenEye has two.
- Oh, guess Jurassic Park has two programmer main characters if you count the one who knows Unix
- > Since John Hammond "spared no expense", it is fair to say he picked 1GiB version at $3,598 a piece. That would give them 7 GiB of storage for a 2026 equivalent of $33,223.70. In 2026, 7 GiB of HDD would cost $0.49.
Did anyone ever try to estimate storage inflation across time? 7GiB could be one or two pc games in 2026, in 1992 one games likely was 1.4MB.
- 7GB could very well be less than a game today. I've got only one commercial game on my Mac, MTW2 at 14GiB, and it's on the older side. But AssaultCube is 80MiB :)
- I feel like there should be an online museum dedicated to reproducing the graphics in movies, as faithfully as possible.
Especially awesome if film-makers started DONATING their video assets to the museum.
- It had a Motorola 68000 processor at 16 MHz, 2–8 megabytes (MB) of RAM, a 9-inch (23 cm) monochrome backlit liquid-crystal display (LCD) with 640 × 400 pixel resolution, and the System 7.0.1 operating system.
A single mp3 would be more than the entire memory, let that sink in :)
- The memory requirement is actually not a problem, because you may be able to stream the mp3 from a harddisk ( easily 159 KB per second from a 2.5 inch ide disk when used on a 7mhz 68000 of amiga 600) or maybe even from a floppy ( 10 KB per second on a double density floppy ).
The actual problem is that mp3 decoding requires lots of math, and the total cpu usage to decode at 22Khz mono is the equivalent of a 68030 running at 50mhz, which is more or less 5 times as much CPU as a 68000 running at 16mhz.
- You'll find plenty of people on HN who grew up with Commodore 64s, thus named for having 64 kilobytes of memory, the approximate size of a website favicon in 2026.
But of course real hackers chiseled their own 0s and 1s out of rock by hand.
- I had a TI-99/4a. 16KB of memory. Expandable with the purchase of an expensive "Peripheral Expansion System" and 32KB card. Or 4KB "mini-memory" cartridge.
- Rock? You were lucky! We used to have to hand pick our zeros and ones from sparse clouds of hydrogen and helium!
- Sometimes we didn’t even have ones, I wrote a whole database once using only zeros. - dilbert
- god forbid if you got a parahydrogen vs a orthohydrogen hydrogen. That reverse spin really messed up the 1's.
- I own a Toshiba Libretto 30. This has a 486 DX4 100 MHz processor. Back at the dawn of MP3s, it could play them .. but only if you used the optimized Fraunhofer decoder, WinAmp would struggle and break up. It didn't quite have the MIPS.
(unfortunately I have lost the PCMCIA sound card required to do this)
- Only if you use today's standard bitrates. Back when storage and bandwidth constraints were real, mp3s came predominantly in 128kbps, which works out to 1MB per minute. The average pop song would only be 3.5 MB in size.
- Some of us don’t have to - we lived it. My first personal computer had an 8-bit processor and 8KB of RAM (that I later upgraded to 32KB and color graphics) and its storage was about 8KB on cassette.
- I have found memories of my PowerBook 100. It was my first computer and everything was just magic back then. Made games and utilities with HyperCard back then. MOved to a LC630 afterward and that so so fast in comparison. I could finally play Marathon without waiting my turn in the LAN parties :D
- I randomly came across a YouTube video [1] on the history of After Effects that I found really interesting. Seems as if there is quite a bit of evidence that the Nedry animation was done with an early preview.
- If people like this post, they will probably like the below post about the typography used in the movie Alien.
The site has typography analysis from several other scifi films too.
- Generally full marks on realism, but I have to ask: Is a combination of SGI and old school macs a sensible platform for running a park? I guess if the macs can get on an appropriate network then they could at least send control commands, but they feel like an odd fit compared to the UNIX™ boxes.
- Canonically, John Hammond spared no expense.
SGI and Apple computers didn't provide the most bang for the buck, or even the most bang, but they sure did use up the most bucks. Other than high prices, and the target market that goes with it, they couldn't have been more different.
The SGI systems were 3D rendering beasts, with a significant portion of their hardware dedicated to the task, making them fast machines for any task, because of the underlying capabilities needed to support that 3D hardware, and they were stable because of the robust Unix operating system. The Apple computers ran on commodity 68040 and an OS that couldn't preempt the software running on it, so a crashed application would take down the whole system.
A stock Amigo computer, at half the price of the Apple system, was just as capable, but supported better upgrades for live video processing. An IBM PS/2 computer running OS/2 would have had the stability of a Unix system, on lower-priced commodity hardware.
If they needed the 3D capabilities of the SGI systems, that was the only option, but if they otherwise only wanted to mess around with video, Amiga computers would have been better than the Apple ones, at a lower price. If they needed something robust, where a user process couldn't crash the system, other Unix workstations would have worked just as well, at a lower price, and an OS/2 workstation would have also worked, at a much, much lower price. Also, there's a rational to having a video-capable Amiga computer along with a robust network-focused Unix or OS/2 workstation, but if you already have an SGI workstation at your desk, you wouldn't really need another computer.
The computers make more sense for someone making movies than someone running an elaborate zoo, but considering how often characters in Michael Crichton's books are authors themselves, it makes sense that characters in his movies to have an affinity toward making movies, and buying the computers that would be used to do so.
- And the out-of-universe explanation is that the Jurassic Park production team had access to SGI "3D rendering beasts" because they needed to render some CGI dinosaurs. So these are both what they had to hand, and what the producers associated with powerful computers.
- Interesting though in retrospect they chose good platforms, Mac and UNIX are still around and flourishing and OS/2 died a death, although would a lot of OS/2 stuff have run on Windows?
- Wasn't the Amiga essentially limited to interlaced video? That basically relegated it to a machine for games or realtime NTSC/PAL video effects.
Also I was never a big Amiga guy so I'm not sure, did they have an equivalent to QuickTime and Cinepak in 1992 to play video clips? Microsoft hadn't released Video for Windows yet.
- > Wasn't the Amiga essentially limited to interlaced video?
No, it supported very high res screens too, but it required special screens such as the A2024 (15" 1024x1024!) Later on there were also RTG graphics cards available.
> Did they have an equivalent to QuickTime and Cinepak in 1992 to play video clips?
The Amiga's graphics were ahead of its time, but the tradeoffs they chose proved very unsuitable for video playback applications (specifically the planar nature.) There eventually did exist video playback tools, but they either assumed the presence of an RTG card, or post-dated the death of the Amiga by several decades.
- Thanks for the reply!
I looked up the A2024
The monitor is quite unique in that it contains an internal framebuffer which is controlled via the RGBI lines of the video port [...] The monitor manages to achieve the high resolutions by effectively buffering four Amiga screens, whereby each screen displays a portion of the overall picture. Because of this, the "effective" refresh rate decreases to around 10-15Hz (software configurable). [...] It seems that the monitor by be able to individually refresh the separate quadrants of the screen, as the quadrant which contains the mouse cursor appears to be updated more frequently
What an amazing hack! Reminds me of the lengths people went to add larger external displays to the early 9" Macs using SCSI graphics cards that basically re-implemented QuickDraw
- Hammond spared no expense except when it came to Nedry, which was a critical mistake.
- According to Nedry.
- Movie-Nedry struck me as a certain kind of hacker trope (but whom I've also met in real life!) where part of their "compensation" is access to unusual and high end computer hardware. It's irrelevant whether it's the best tool for the job (and as the page notes, Nedry seems to use his fancy SGI system mostly to render 3D chess). But, at least in principle, it's relatively cheap payment to keep your programmers happy (though it didn't exactly work out in the movie).
- I don't think that it makes much economic sense. That hardware was extremely expensive at the time, developer salaries weren't as high, and hardware progress was extremely fast, so the computers had to be replaced every two or three years to remain practical, not just cool.
- I used to work in an IT department that I called 'The Onion'. That's because the further into the room you went the older the systems got. It was a mix of almost anything you could think of in the mid 90's thru to mid 2000's. The oldest machine was some SGI thing.
So you would be surprised but also, it meant there were a lot of grey beards keeping the whole thing running.
- At my college there was a tiny tucked away lab that had these giant old dot matrix printers that were very very fast and noisy (they were under plexiglass covers). I don’t remember why I was in there or what I was doing but I must have sent a binary to them because they took off and were printing the winding characters. The admins banned me after that. Heh by junior year there were a handful of labs on campus that when I walked in the gray beards (probably grad students) just pointed at the door and I walked right back out.
- The Macs won't old school at the time. They were high-end workstations for anyone who didn't need Unix and wanted a GUI that worked.
- Right. I just mean that macs running pre-Darwin Mac OS seem an odd choice.
- They’re an odd choice now. Back then they would have made sense as a UI to the Unix machines.
- Not much because a click on a menu would almost halt the entire network by design. Cheaper dumb Unix terminals were a thing where you jut used telnet and X forwarding.
- The early web was born on the back of Mac's connecting to SGI machines...
- Err, no. SGIs were first very expensive (3D) graphics workstations and later mostly also-rans in some other markets like storage and general-purpose big servers.
Servers were Sun, x86, HP-PA, IBM R6000 RISC (and probably some more UNIX / RISC systems). Workstations were PC, Sun, Apple (mostly for graphics / design), some NeXT.
- Er, yes.
Many media companies onboarded to the web in the early 90's using SGI machines.
The Indy was a very popular multi-host system for such things. It was not a graphics powerhouse and in many low-end configurations its primary function was web serving.
(Disclaimer: I helped build the early web using SGI systems, with many major media companies as clients..)
- OK, I see that an Indy went for about the same price as a SPARCstation 5 in 1993. I knew about the low-cost Indy, but not that it was that low cost (for a UNIX workstation, about $5000).
- They even had the "WebFORCE" branding with the "to author and serve" tagline! I also did a lot of early web work on an Indy, and we hosted on a Challenge!
I have a Challenge S right now, and when I got it the drive had web hosting setup for a car dealer.
- true. the book was written before Windows was released.
- The book came out in 1990, the same year Windows 3.0 was released. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and 2.0 was released in 1987.
- Almost noone used Windows until Windows 3.1. Not even engineering colleges. For intents and purposes, Windows does not really exist til 3.1 for most people. And that didn't even have a TCP/IP stack native; you had to install WinSock.
- More than high end, low-mid end for journalists, book writing and editing people, graphic designers, magazine producers and whatnot. Really high end machines were the Sun and SGI ones.
- A Quadra 700 could run A/UX 3.0 or higher, which would make it relatively pleasant for the macs and unix workstations to interoperate (provided you spared no expense).
- In addition to A/UX, there were X window servers for classic Mac OS, with the companies making them selling it as a cheaper alternative to get a graphic UNIX terminal
- Wow, TIL! I moved from a Linux desktop to a Mac when OS X was new, and thought it was cool that I could run an X server locally. I didn't have much experience with classic Mac OS, and never would have guessed there was an X server for it.
- Macs probably would've been a reasonable choice for all the administrative/office tasks (emails, spreadsheets, presentations, all that jazz), leaving the heavy lifting to the IRIX boxen. Probably would've also been the typical first choice for GUI-driven applications (like NedryLand).
But I wasn't quite alive yet in 1991 (let alone administering IT deployments for biolabs and theme parks colocated on remote tropical islands), so what do I know lmao
- The Jurassic park crew supposedly had a lot of money, and I would argue that any computer nerd, at the time depicted, would have gone with that combo. SGI for Unix and the power and Macs for admin. I would have.
- Pretty much. This was at the period where Macs were in an unfortunate middle ground. Still great at UI heavy stuff but not hitting the higher performance of top end machines or the low price of PC's. They still had a decent place in Office settings, education and libraries but that was about it. Of course after Windows 3 came along in 1990 the UI advantage started to erode but wasn't quiet there yet by the time this movie came along.
- SGI machines mostly cost a lot of money for the 3D graphics hardware. They didn't make much sense for other purposes.
- If you were already an IRIX shop, the servers were performant for a lot of uses. SGI did networking and disk I/O at least as well as Sun, IBM, and HP. We ran NFS and Perforce for hundreds of developers on SGI servers.
- Macintosh and SGI (+AIX, various Unix) were in fact a common combination used as desktop and backend server respectively in many 1990's scientific labs including biology labs.
- I can see the SGI machines. Those were top of the line things (though sort of more for rendering...). The macs seem weird. I still remember wondering if he meant svr3 or svr4.
- Right - if it was all SGI, or even a mix of unix workstations, I wouldn't have blinked. It's just the macs that throw me.
- Why? Hybrid systems were and still are common. Today a common IT setup is Macs connecting to UNIX servers over the network.
- I think it was more about Macs not being used for scientific applications much until the 2000s. Up until a bunch of programmers up and switched to MacBooks, Apples were more usually used by more artistic types. They were quite big for writing and art stuff, then, mostly, though pricey. And no separate monitors.
- Same. I'd have chosen some of those new Xerox Parc bad boys.
- In the 90s, at SGI (at least in France) they had Macs as workstations for tasks that didn't require or weren't compatible with an expensive SGI computer (like running MS Office or sending faxes). They switched to SGI Indy and O2 (running SoftWindows95 to run MS Office) at some point around 95/96, but that was a pretty expensive option, and Softwindows95 was a dog unless you had a really fast R10000 O2.
- According to the post, the first computer was in their trailer, but there's an earlier scene where they're using a monitor to view the raptor bones in a tent at the dig site. Not sure if that counts but I'd like to have learned more about that device.
- I noticed that too but elected to not make it count.
- The attention to detail spent here was what sparked my original interest in computers which inevitably led to my career. as a young man, watching this movie I was amazed that one man and a bunch of computers could unleash such mayhem.
- Minor typo fix "SuperMach" > "SuperMatch
- Hey Fabien! It doesn't look like the link for this article is on your main page. I love your posts and check the main page frequently each week; I totally missed it until I saw it here.
- You have to force-refresh with Cmd + Shift + R. I don't know why Chrome caches it despite the .html being updated.
- fabiensanglard - thanks for all the wonderful posts about.. everything! While I started reading your blog when it was more focused on old games and C development, I still check it from time to time. I'm always blown away by the level of details you manage to dig up and present - no matter the subject.
- Thank you :) !
- This is why I love the internet! Thank you to the author for taking the time!
- Yeah this reminded me of “the good old days” of the internet when every site felt like this :)
- And I was worried I wasn't going to have anything to read tonight.
- This is so cool that we need a new HN feature for this like a 'gold bar'. Dang can you build this?
- I used to have a script running that whenever somebody failed to SSH into my laptop, it would blurt out "I hate this hacker crap" [1]. I had mostly forgotten about it until I was at a conference and it starts going off - followed by a guy nobody knew quickly leaving.
- Another detail worth mentioning via Taniwha [1] was Supermac had an engineer on set and configured the graphics cards to run the monitors at 24hz so they wouldn't have any banding when filmed.
- Protip: all modern monitors and TVs can still run at 50HZ and you can configure Linux to use it all the time --> zero vsync micro jumps when running european software under ZX, Amiga or C64 emulators :)
- Is there a behind the scenes detail on Jurassic Park branding and logo? I love how well they planned it ahead and wove that into every thing we see across the park.
- Let me google that for myself :)
https://grapheine.com/en/magazine/the-story-of-the-big-bad-j...
- > The filename whte_rbt.obj is not mentioned in the movie
From 1:09:50 – 1:10:13, we join Arnold as he describes Nedry's methods to Sadler, Hammond and Muldoon.
At 1:10:00, Ray Arnold mentions the whte_rbt.obj — whatever it did, it did it all.
- This is great - lovely detail.
- This the the type of content I live for!
- In the 2nd image (clearest) and other images, there appears to be some binary encoding in red. It must encode something!
- And yet again I am reminded of how SGI was so far ahead of the graphics game and yet was absolutely demolished because others could see the potential for domestic add-on cards when SGI was focusing on entire work stations.
3DFX and Nvidia ultimately put them out of business.
- I’m not a scholar of the fall of SGI. But, I’m sure it has been documented in detail.
AFAICT, SGI was a textbook Innovator’s Dilemma case with an expensive enterprise product that’s hard to give up in the face of cheap, low-margin competition.
- This is true. I was at SGI, and their entire business was optimized to serving the needs of very sophisticated customers who were themselves pushing the envelope. Absolutely great customers to work with. But SGI’s DNA couldn’t adjust to the low margin high volume consumer space.
They built an incredible Windows NT system (for the time) but couldn’t keep up with the 6 month release cycle their competitors were on.
SGI was an incredible place to work while it lasted.
- Spot on. They had the tech advantages but the high margins of full work stations blinded them to the changing winds in the industry.
I remember at the time seeing some folks blown away that they could do SGI like stuff on a PC with a $199 add on card. It wasn't identical but it was close enough and you didn't have to switch to out of the Windows ecosystem. That kind of scaling and software inertia is just too hard to compete against.
- > That kind of scaling and software inertia is just too hard to compete against.
What stopped SGI from offering such $199 add-on cards, but with their name on it?
- They were offered one mass-market opportunity on a silver platter, which they took: When Nintendo asked them to design the N64 GPU. It didn't seem to be very profitable for them.
- It's very unclear in that era that there is a big market for 3D graphics at home. So their big customers would buy the cheap cards but in low volumes -> bankruptcy. And maybe there's either no big consumer market, or it grows too slowly to replace the loss of their main business.
- Hubris. And Microsoft.
- 3dfx and nVidia even put Matrox out of business. The 1990's were a true competitive paradise up and down the stack, not like today.
- It's a shame that HPE doesn't make graphics workstations any more.
- This is incredibly insightful!
- Another good Jurassic Park content is this filming locations video. Almost everything can still be visited today https://youtu.be/34r8Ypxzkk4
- Not movie related, but this let’s play of the JP game Trespasser also goes into a lot of detail and is generally super interesting
- Fabien did a code review of Trespasser back in 2014: https://fabiensanglard.net/trespasser/index.php
- Oh very cool, thanks for the link
- Related 9 days ago:
Starring the Computer
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48796093
and the Jurassic Park (1993) page there: https://www.starringthecomputer.com/feature.php?f=11
- This is a 'classic' and I don't know why this isn't higher up the list. I actually opened the comments just to post it if no one already had.
- Im curious how they got the digital version of Jaws to play on a computer in... 1992?
- By ripping it to Cinepak or MPEG from a VHS capture?
- Well, you know, a computer had to have been involved in that digital version of Jaws ..
- And a certain director...
- I like how the article has little notes saying "Trivia", when actually the whole article is trivia. (This isn't to detract from it, it's fun trivia and I enjoyed reading it!)
- There used to be a really good video on YouTube that covered the code that was displayed on the screen. Unfortunately, it seems to have been removed from YouTube.
- Guess my OS?
- “It’s a Unix system. … I know this” XD
Back in the days when it was an MS-DOS world…
- The 3D file browser was one of the demo programs that came pre-installed on SGI machines, at least in the late '90s.
- plan9, obviously, philistine!
- note that gr_osview has been reincarnated as xosview (available on most unix distros, a simple apt-get away on buntu)
- nice
- [dead]
- [flagged]
- [dead]
- [flagged]
- [dead]
- [dead]
- [dead]
- In Safari (macOS Beta), none of the pictures load. In dev tools shows 403 error for all. If view the image urls directly shows "It appears you don't have permission to access this page.
403 Error. Forbidden." in a stylized font. Content blockers are "not" enabled. Able to replicate in Private window too. In Chrome however, images all load normally, also able to view the image urls directly. Very odd. No VPN and Private Relay is "off". Very unusual, will have to do some more digging assuming this is just affecting me and not others in Safari on latest macOS beta.
Update works in latest Safari Tech Preview, so assuming some cache/cookie/etc issue even though again affects Private mode.
- I ran into the same problem with Firefox, except viewing it directly works.
It turns out the server is using referer checking and I've got referer disabled. Compare the following curl invocations:
vs. justcurl 'https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/00_11_15_Apple_Powerbook_100.webp' \ -H 'Referer: https://fabiensanglard.net/'
The latter gives a 403.curl 'https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/00_11_15_Apple_Powerbook_100.webp' - Safari is riddled with bugs in the beta, nothing websites can do about it.
