Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

vvinhnx about 3 hours ago 22 commentsRead Article on fabiensanglard.net

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kalleboo•about 2 hours ago

> 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 a mockup.

Source: https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/jurassic-park-tablet-d...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752261

rakel_rakel•about 1 hour ago

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?

kalleboo•about 1 hour ago

> 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

mrpippy•about 2 hours ago

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.

smaili•about 2 hours ago

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 :)

yoyohello13•about 2 hours ago

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.

jambalaya8•about 2 hours ago

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.

trimbo•about 2 hours ago

> [CM-5] With a pricetag of "only" $46,000 per machine, it is very possible these were authentic.

The base price was $750K for 32 CPUs. If Google is correct and memory serves, the one at NCSA cost around $10-15M and had 512 CPU.

I can't remember where I saw it but for the movie IIRC they just had the casing with the blinky lights.

> Ray Arnold's workstation is a SGI R4000 Indigo.

IIRC the R4000s looked identical so it could have still been an R3000. But if SGI was supplying them in September 1992 (when filming was happening), it could have been an R4000.

yjftsjthsd-h•about 2 hours ago

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.

RodgerTheGreat•about 1 hour ago

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.

jambalaya8•about 1 hour ago

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.

LeoPanthera•about 2 hours ago

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.

ColdStream•about 2 hours ago

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.

tikimcfee•about 2 hours ago

And I was worried I wasn't going to have anything to read tonight.

ColdStream•about 2 hours ago

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.

KasianFranks•about 2 hours ago

Guess my OS?