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Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
- Jare 9mo agoNormally you don't want to read the comments, but if you're curious about the topic please make an exception here.
- kstrauser 9mo agoNo kidding! The people directly involved give plenty of background info about it. That was an interesting read.
- shlip 9mo ago> It's the design mock up from the final presentation to Motorola for the iRadio (name later changed to Envoy). > The head of frogdesign, Hartmut Esslinger met Spielberg on a plane and showed him this mockup. Steven asked if it could be used as a prop in the film, and Hartmut gave it to him.
- cbdevidal 9mo agoIt’s mind-blowing to me that the actual guy who designed it chimed in. Assuming it’s not a fake comment, what are the odds!?
- eterm 9mo agoMuch greater than now, given the open discoverability of the original post here, versus the walled-off content we have today, locked away in discord servers and the like. Furthermore, the act of replying to that post will have bumped it right back to the top for everyone to see.
- kasperset 9mo agoI agree with this. We are much missing these forums with civil replies and clouded behind "influencer" culture, which is optimized for incentives. Pure discussions as in this example are such a stalwarts of open web. On the other hand, small websites and forums can disappear but that openness allows platform like archive.org to capture and "fossilize" them.
- darepublic 9mo agoLike mosquitos trapped in amber, preserving hidden blocks of knowledge
- YokoZar 9mo agoThese forums still exist. Typically with much older and mature discussions, as the users have aged alongside the forums. Nothing is stopping you from joining them now. My Something Awful forums account is over 25 years old at this point. The software and standards and moderation style is approximately unchanged, complete with 10 dollar sign-up fee to keep out the spam.
- abanana 9mo agoThat's why I like HN, it seems to happen a lot here! Mention a piece of hardware or software, even something obscure from years ago, and half an hour later you've had an answer to your question from the designer or the CEO.
- gopher_space 9mo agoMe too. I'm just afraid that it's because there are shrinking pools of rationality on the internet. They're here for the same reason you are; HN doesn't suck nearly as much as the alternatives.
- sdrothrock 9mo agoPretty high on the RPF, actually! Especially in the early days, a lot of film, prop, and design industry professionals would congregate there and exchange information or big shop folklore. It was a pretty cool place (not saying it hasn't continued to be one, but I haven't been a regular in probably 20 years).
- jansan 9mo agoWow, Motorola had an iRadio before Apple released their first iPhone? I did not know that.
- dredmorbius 9mo ago"iPhone" was an Infogear, later Cisco, trademark, for the InfoGear iPhone (1997--2000 / InfoGear, Cisco/Linksys 2006--2007), which was licenced to Apple. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(internet_appliance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(internet_appliance)> <https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/cisco-infogear-iphone-trademark https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/cisco-infogear-iphon...>
- calgoo 9mo agoIt was licensed... eventually :) Cisco where quick to bring Apple to court if i remember correctly.
- dehrmann 9mo agoI was at Cisco when the Apple iPhone was announced. It was rumored to be happening, so Cisco rushed out a Linksys VoIP(?) phone rebranded (it might have just been a sticker) as an "iPhone" so they could defend the trademark. They quickly reached an agreement with Apple. I remember they might have been getting their VPN included on the device. I'm sure there was a similar issue with iOS, and that caused me to get a lot of not-so-relevant emails from recruiters looking for mobile devs.
- venusenvy47 8mo agoThe weirder phone that they had was the ROKR in 2005. It was a collaboration with Apple and worked with iTunes. People say that it helped Apple get in the phone business, and helped Motorola become even more irrelevant in that space around this time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr_E1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr_E1
- swyx 9mo agook so it now begs the question... whos plane was this?
- egiboy 9mo agoThe question that flew under the radar ;)
- worldofmeden 8mo agoThis is really cool information
- dbushell 9mo agoJurassic Park III (2001) has a 3D printer that’s central to a plot line. I know they have a long history but I remember thinking that was more sci-fi than the dinosaurs.
- hsbauauvhabzb 9mo agoThe latest Jurassic park was more (bad) sci-fi than dinosaurs, and I’m not talking 3d printers. It was terrible.
- dhosek 8mo agoMy local theater does “mystery movies” on select Monday nights where for $6 I can see a before first run movie with the catch that I don’t know what it is before it starts. The last JP movie was one of these last summer and I was so glad I didn’t pay regular price for it. I had hoped it could be good but it turned out to just be a lot of nonsense to the point where I was hoping the dinosaurs would eat all the people.
- rusk 9mo agoIn Arthur C Clarke’s 2001 a space odyssey, in the book, he describes a flat handheld device that is used for reading the New York Times. He can’t remember the exact details but the ergonomics he describes perfectly encapsulate the tablet devices we have today. I’m pretty certain he wrote it before the 1969 moon landing.
- markus_zhang 9mo agoI read the book a few months ago and was shocked by this too.
- simonw 9mo agoThe movie itself predates the moon landing - it came out in 1968. It's astonishing to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey today and reflect on how well the production design has aged. That movie is coming up on 60 years old now! The portrayal of AI has held up extraordinarily well too.
- serf 9mo ago>The portrayal of AI has held up extraordinarily well too. it's interesting to think that many of our current AIs were trained on our fiction in a weird self-fulfilling strange loop. of course the portrayal aged well, the damn things are using the material as a mimicry source.
- hsbauauvhabzb 9mo agoJust don’t feed it the terminator movies, or the matrix.
- dhosek 8mo agoToo late.
- dhosek 8mo agoI have an unfinished novel I started in 2013 where I wrote a scene which seemed pretty sci-fi at the time but now seems like contemporary agentic AI.
- Basje 9mo agoVery cool. I saw Jurassic Park in the cinema and remember thinking that the Unix system that they used was some Hollywood fancy, but I learned much later that it was actually a prototype of a gui [0]. It appears that Spielberg was well-connected to tech people at the time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer
- B1FIDO 9mo agoI mean actually the FSV that you refer to is a clone of the SGI IRIX utility, fsn, that was actually depicted on a live computer in the film. SGI was well-known to the film industry, because their IRIX systems were basically the sine qua non of graphics workstations and powerhouses. SGI invested heavily in the graphical capabilities, including 3D rendering, and therefore when the industry graduated from Amigas with the "Video Toaster" they slid into SGI systems quite nicely. So it stood to reason that a couple of them would show up in an actual film. How plausible it was to have SGI systems on-site at a Jurassic Park type lab? I don't know, but seems reasonable, if they were also crunching DNA numbers.
- jon-wood 9mo agoThey had at least one Cray on site in the novel, a few SGI workstations seems very plausible.
- B1FIDO 9mo agoWhile it is true that Silicon Graphics eventually acquired Cray Computer, they did it after the novel, and the film's release, but I would suppose that even before the 1996 acquisition that SGI and Cray machines were very good partners, like peas in a pod. It is important to remember that nobody who operated a Cray did it in isolation. The supercomputers always require some extra workstations arrayed around it in order to get stuff done. Of course, there were remote connections too, but often there would be at least one sort of "dedicated user console" that was closely coupled to the supercomputer itself. I believe that some supercomputers of that era were poorly equipped to actually handle interactive user sessions, and that's why.
- kilroy123 9mo agoI love Jurassic Park, the movie, because it was so wildly ahead of its time in so many ways. Also, mandatory https://jurassicsystems.com https://jurassicsystems.com.
- bloomingeek 9mo agoLove it, Samuel L and pre-Newman in the same scene! (Well, almost.)
- dhosek 8mo agoI somehow hadn’t realized until last year that JP (and JFK) were both before Wayne Knight took on the role of Newman. I had the distinct impression when watching the films that I already knew him.
- jasongill 9mo agoI hate this hacker crap!
- jdshaffer 9mo agoWhy are people downvoting this? It's just a quote from the movie...
- mrgriscom 9mo agoThe circuit breaker from the restoring power scene is real too: https://www.google.com/search?q=westinghouse+spb-100&udm=2 https://www.google.com/search?q=westinghouse+spb-100&udm=2
- crims0n 9mo agoWhen I was a kid I always wondered why Dr. Sattler had to manually prime/charge the breaker before enabling it. Apparently it is because that model (and others like it) use a spring to quickly close the circuit. When she is priming it puts tension into the spring, and when she presses the button it quickly releases and completes the circuit. This is done to prevent arc flashes due to the high voltage and amperage, since the coiled spring snapping into place can complete the circuit much faster than any human pulling a lever could.
- sandyarmstrong 9mo ago> it puts tension into the spring Well it certainly put tension into the scene! Thanks.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo agoWe have ones like that at work for doing generator switchover - talking about Aggreko 20-foot shipping container generators providing hundreds of kW to power a pair of UPSes the size of a full-size Ford Transit, not your cute little 130-from-Hofer-pull-the-string-puttputtputt genny ;-) You pump up the handle to charge a pneumatic cylinder and when you cut over it throws a set of three contacts about the size of a first-gen Kindle from one side to the other, switching from incoming mains to genny power in about 1/100th of a second. It goes with a hell of a bang.
- echelon 9mo agoAs is the supercomputer. It's the Thinking Machine Connection Machine CM-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine https://www.jurassic-pedia.com/cm-5-thinking-machine/ https://www.jurassic-pedia.com/cm-5-thinking-machine/ The LED panel is gorgeous: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Ko4qBkEcBM https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Ko4qBkEcBM A lot of people have replicated or restored these: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qm6w57ZcJZQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=qm6w57ZcJZQ https://www.housedillon.com/posts/resurrected-led-panels/ https://www.housedillon.com/posts/resurrected-led-panels/ --- I've always hoped the film series would be rebooted back to the original novel. The first film was a masterpiece, and everything that's followed has been increasingly awful. Dinosaurs and cloning are way too cool for that amount of disrespect. I'd kill for an R-rated horror film (think Alien) based on the book, especially if it were set in 1980 and deeply scientific like the original. That was the only film in the series with believably smart characters, each pursuing complex motivations, with fulfilling character arcs. The plot focused on the people, and dinosaurs were the dressing.
- paulcole 9mo agoUnrelated but I have long held a Jurassic Park Theory of Startups. The easier you can map yourself and coworkers to characters in Jurassic Park the bleaker the prospects of the company.
- bartread 9mo agoI love stuff like this. Often films and TV shows have anachronisms in them (like the very first episode, IIRC, of Narcos with the clearly very modern touchscreen photocopier where the screen has been covered with a piece of paper, or the BMW that wasn't released until the mid/late 1990s), but every so often you'll see something that is instead a flash of the future. Due to #reasons I watched the sentry gun scene in Aliens for the first time in decades the other day. This scene only appears in the director's cut of the film. Anyway, bearing in mind it was released in 1986, imagine my utter shock when Hicks busts out a couple of laptops to monitor and manage the guns. The machines in question are a pair of GRiD Compasses, originally released in, I think, 1984. Imagine that: a laptop computer from 1984. They're not even that big and cumbersome. Of course, the specs are laughable by today's standards but actually pretty decent for the period, and especially for portables. In terms of memory and raw CPU power they'd certainly have wiped the floor with the average home computer of the day, although graphics capabilities might have been non-existent, and sound would have been PC speaker at best. So, yeah, Nedry with a tablet? I can buy that. His whole den/lair is like a toy box of the coolest hardware and software from the early 1990s. But for all the times I've seen the film, I've never spotted this before.
- adrian_b 9mo agoGRiD Compass was the first portable computer in the now ubiquitous clamshell format, and it was launched in April 1982, several years before "Aliens". It was used in several high-profile applications, like in the NASA Space Shuttle and in some special operations of the US military. Therefore its use in the movie does not have any fantastic element in it. They have patented the clamshell form, so all the early laptop manufacturers had to license their patent. GRiD Compass was designed since the beginning with the main goal of being a computer that can be carried in a briefcase (at that time, engineers and programmers normally carried briefcases, not backpacks like today). This was somewhat similar with how the first "scientific" calculator had been designed by Hewlett-Packard, with the main goal of fitting inside a shirt pocket. There have been a number of earlier portable computers, made by IBM, Xerox, Scrib, Sony, Epson, Osborne and a few others, but most of those were much more cumbersome and more difficult to carry (they were nicknamed "sewing machine" computers, for their size and weight), mainly because they had CRT displays, while GRiD Compass had a beautiful flat electroluminescent display. Before GRiD Compass, there had also been a few Japanese portable computers with flat LCD screens, but in those the screen could not be folded, the body of the computer was in one piece, containing both the screen and the keyboard, like in an oversized calculator, so their screens were very small and they used very weak CPUs in comparison with GRiD Compass, which had an Intel 8086 (but it was not compatible with the IBM PC, as it was launched when the IBM PC was only 8 months old and not yet as important as it has become later).
- davisr 9mo agoNot a single mention of General Magic or Magic Cap, the software running on the tablet? Smh.
- raffael_de 9mo agoWayne Knight aka Newman was - as far as I can tell - the most successful regular cast member from Seinfeld with respect to a movie career outside of that show.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dehrmann 9mo agoPatrick Warburton probably has him beat.
- dhosek 8mo agoJulia Louis-Dreyfus? (Although looking at her filmography, it turns out that four of the movies I’d seen were where she’s had big roles in were just in the last three years.
- raffael_de 8mo agofun fact: her father is billionaire. i guess that predisposes an acting inclined person to take a risk like seinfeld but keeps you from being hungry enough to walk hard.
- qingcharles 9mo agoIf you like trying to identify everyday objects used as props in movies: https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/
- mnemotronic 9mo agoIt looks like he's using my beloved Northgate keyboard.
- doublerabbit 9mo agoI still want the Gibson towers from the movie Hackers https://i0.wp.com/scifiinterfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Hackers_3D_browsing_0800-1.png https://i0.wp.com/scifiinterfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
- hsbauauvhabzb 9mo agoYou could probably make something like that with plexiglass