Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

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vvinhnx about 3 hours ago 41 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 an original mockup.

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

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

fabiensanglard•about 1 hour ago

Thanks, I am going to update the article!

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

nanolith•20 minutes ago

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.

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?

gdubs•37 minutes ago

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaNuVR75cwY

sosuke•18 minutes ago

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:)

Mistletoe•6 minutes ago

It’s so lame they changed the LEDs to meaning nothing.

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.

fabiensanglard•about 1 hour ago

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?

mrpippy•33 minutes ago

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...

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.

yoyohello13•16 minutes ago

It was kind of scary how prescient Jurassic Park was. Just swap genetics for AI and his warnings are incredibly applicable to modern times.

albert_e•about 1 hour ago

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.

albert_e•about 1 hour ago

Let me google that for myself :)

https://grapheine.com/en/magazine/the-story-of-the-big-bad-j...

https://jurassicpark.fandom.com/wiki/Jurassic_Park_logo

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.

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.

yjftsjthsd-h•about 1 hour ago

Right. I just mean that macs running pre-Darwin Mac OS seem an odd choice.

jambalaya8•about 1 hour ago

true. the book was written before Windows was released.

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.

RodgerTheGreat•about 2 hours 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 (provided you spared no expense).

yellowapple•about 1 hour ago

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

bjelkeman-again•about 1 hour ago

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.

ColdStream•7 minutes ago

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.

kalleboo•about 1 hour ago

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

jambalaya8•about 2 hours 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.

yjftsjthsd-h•about 1 hour ago

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.

jambalaya8•about 1 hour ago

Same. I'd have chosen some of those new Xerox Parc bad boys.

sswn•about 1 hour ago

This is why I love the internet! Thank you to the author for taking the time!

aboardRat4•about 1 hour ago

It's a shame that HPE doesn't make graphics workstations any more.

tikimcfee•about 2 hours ago

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

ChrisArchitect•21 minutes ago

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

ChrisArchitect•24 minutes ago

https://www.jurassicsystems.com/

haunter•42 minutes ago

Another good Jurassic Park content is this filming locations video. Almost everything can still be visited today https://youtu.be/34r8Ypxzkk4

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.

corysama•14 minutes ago

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.

KasianFranks•about 2 hours ago

Guess my OS?

bfung•about 1 hour ago

“It’s a Unix system. … I know this” XD

Back in the days when it was an MS-DOS world…

ButlerianJihad•39 minutes ago

plan9, obviously, philistine!