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Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
- tikimcfee 3mo agoAnd I was worried I wasn't going to have anything to read tonight.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- smaili 3mo agoIt 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 :)
- decimalenough 3mo agoYou'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.
- Intermernet 3mo agoRock? You were lucky! We used to have to hand pick our zeros and ones from sparse clouds of hydrogen and helium!
- chasd00 3mo agoSometimes we didn’t even have ones, I wrote a whole database once using only zeros. - dilbert
- linksnapzz 3mo ago“You had zeros? We had to use the letter “O”…” -Wally
- jsymolon 3mo agogod forbid if you got a parahydrogen vs a orthohydrogen hydrogen. That reverse spin really messed up the 1's.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoI 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.
- ivolimmen 3mo agoI remember I have my first computer that could actually play MP3's. The computer I had before it could store them but not play them. So yeah I remember those times...
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- pjc50 3mo agoI 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)
- windenntw 3mo agoThe 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.
- tremon 3mo agoOnly 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.
- jguimont 3mo agoI 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
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoSome 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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3mo agoGenerally 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.
- ColdStream 3mo agoI 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.
- chasd00 3mo agoAt 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.
- LeoPanthera 3mo agoThe 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.
- jambalaya8 3mo agotrue. the book was written before Windows was released.
- bradyd 3mo ago
- yoyohello13 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoCrichton 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 3mo agoIt was kind of scary how prescient Jurassic Park was. Just swap genetics for AI and his warnings are incredibly applicable to modern times.
- MrToadMan 3mo agoMuch 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.
- ricardobeat 3mo agoThat’s an amazing connection, had no idea they were written by the same person but the underlying theme is pretty consistent.
- criticas 3mo ago
- mrpippy 3mo agoAlso, 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 3mo agoThank 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 3mo agoThese links show the pinout: https://hardware.majix.org/computers/sgi/keyboards.shtml https://hardware.majix.org/computers/sgi/keyboards.shtml https://hardware.majix.org/computers/sgi.pi/keyboard.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_keyboard https://github.com/jtsiomb/sgikbd/blob/master/doc/sgi_man7_k...
- KasianFranks 3mo agoGuess my OS?
- bfung 3mo ago“It’s a Unix system. … I know this” XD Back in the days when it was an MS-DOS world…
- ColdStream 3mo agoJust wouldn't have hit the same. "It's a DOS system... I need to edit the config.sys because the mouse driver has taken up too much base memory and I need to configure EMM386." "Oh great! Is this HDD Master or Slave? Where are my tweezers, I need to swap the jumper!"
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Findecanor 3mo agoThe 3D file browser was one of the demo programs that came pre-installed on SGI machines, at least in the late '90s.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo agoplan9, obviously, philistine!
- ColdStream 3mo agoAnd 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 3mo agoI’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.
- ColdStream 3mo agoSpot 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.
- RetroTechie 3mo ago> 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?
- aa-jv 3mo agoHubris. And Microsoft.
- mike_hearn 3mo agoIt'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.
- kalleboo 3mo 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-device-on-nedrys-desk.169883/#post-2929104 https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/jurassic-park-tablet-d... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752261
- RunSet 3mo agohttps://i.imgur.com/kl90PCH.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/kl90PCH.mp4
- fabiensanglard 3mo agoThanks, I am going to update the article!
- TurdF3rguson 3mo agoLife finds a way
- vishnugupta 3mo agoThank you! What a beautiful and appropriate meta comment!
- ronbenton 3mo agoIMO this is the social internet at its best. Pretty obscure question answered relatively quickly with answer and source.
- Waterluvian 3mo agoAI 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.
- rakel_rakel 3mo agoWhat 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?
- OwlsParlay 3mo ago"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.
- solarkraft 3mo agoWhat a respectful view of the audience. Too bad this approach was replicated what feels like approximately 0 times after it. https://youtube.com/watch?v=kl6rsi7BEtk https://youtube.com/watch?v=kl6rsi7BEtk
- mike_hearn 3mo agoA 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_Crichton.php 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."
- kalleboo 3mo 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_Workshop 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 https://kalleboo.com/linked/Reduce.p.txt MPW 3.1:Examples:Examples:CheckOutActive https://kalleboo.com/linked/CheckOutActive.txt https://kalleboo.com/linked/CheckOutActive.txt MPW 3.1:Examples:Examples:DerezPict https://kalleboo.com/linked/DerezPict.txt https://kalleboo.com/linked/DerezPict.txt
- albert_e 3mo agoIs 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- albert_e 3mo agoLet me google that for myself :) https://grapheine.com/en/magazine/the-story-of-the-big-bad-jurassic-park-logosaurus/ https://grapheine.com/en/magazine/the-story-of-the-big-bad-j... https://jurassicpark.fandom.com/wiki/Jurassic_Park_logo https://jurassicpark.fandom.com/wiki/Jurassic_Park_logo
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- aboardRat4 3mo agoIt's a shame that HPE doesn't make graphics workstations any more.
- sswn 3mo agoThis is why I love the internet! Thank you to the author for taking the time!
- tomduncalf 3mo agoYeah this reminded me of “the good old days” of the internet when every site felt like this :)
- haunter 3mo agoAnother good Jurassic Park content is this filming locations video. Almost everything can still be visited today https://youtu.be/34r8Ypxzkk4 https://youtu.be/34r8Ypxzkk4
- iamacyborg 3mo agoNot movie related, but this let’s play of the JP game Trespasser also goes into a lot of detail and is generally super interesting https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0058A651EB882B48 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0058A651EB882B48
- torh 3mo agoFabien did a code review of Trespasser back in 2014: https://fabiensanglard.net/trespasser/index.php https://fabiensanglard.net/trespasser/index.php
- iamacyborg 3mo agoOh very cool, thanks for the link
- gdubs 3mo agoIt 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaNuVR75cwY
- sosuke 3mo agoI 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:)
- pdpi 3mo agoThen 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-machine/ https://longnow.org/ideas/richard-feynman-and-the-connection...
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Sharlin 3mo agoIt’s a real classic. An amazing article super worth reading (and re-reading if it’s been a while) and almost infinitely quotable.
- magesh_magi1 3mo agoWhat 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.
- JCattheATM 3mo ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agohttps://www.jurassicsystems.com/ https://www.jurassicsystems.com/
- korse 3mo agoThis 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.
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoRelated 9 days ago: Starring the Computer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48796093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48796093 and the Jurassic Park (1993) page there: https://www.starringthecomputer.com/feature.php?f=11 https://www.starringthecomputer.com/feature.php?f=11
- nanolith 3mo agoHow 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.
- superxpro12 3mo agoIm curious how they got the digital version of Jaws to play on a computer in... 1992?
- MomsAVoxell 3mo agoWell, you know, a computer had to have been involved in that digital version of Jaws ..
- MWil 3mo agoAnd a certain director...
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- anthk 3mo agoBy ripping it to Cinepak or MPEG from a VHS capture?
- JeremyHerrman 3mo 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.
- js2 3mo agoMy family owned a Mac Portable (the backlit model). Running Word for Mac 5.1, it was a fantastic writing machine.
- sedatk 3mo agoWhen 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) [1] https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision
- ivolimmen 3mo agoThis 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.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3mo agoThere's always NsCDE which should run on modern Linux. Haven't tried it myself. https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
- sombragris 3mo agoI have both CDE and NsCDE installed on my system (Slackware64-current). Both run well and, surprisingly, good ol' CDE behaves better in some respects. You can download the original CDE here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ Reading from the activity, it still seems to receive some fixes and updates although, as the SlackBuild author said, it would not be advisable to use it in an internet-facing desktop for security reasons. NsCDE also behaves very well. Otherwise, you can use Xfce which was heavily inspired by CDE; and now, even Plasma 6 have a very good CDE-like (or Motif) theme.
- jzer0cool 3mo agoIn the 2nd image (clearest) and other images, there appears to be some binary encoding in red. It must encode something!
- fluencytax 3mo ago[dead]
- npunt 3mo agoAnother 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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25392870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25392870
- windenntw 3mo agoProtip: 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 :)
- rcarmo 3mo agoI find it fascinating that I submitted this yesterday and it failed to get any traction then - is it the AI spam that has turned submitting stuff less visible?
- rcarmo 3mo agoAnd yet, downvoting is still working within seconds of my commenting! Rock on HN, never change.
- ur-whale 3mo agonote that gr_osview has been reincarnated as xosview (available on most unix distros, a simple apt-get away on buntu)
- runtime_lens 3mo ago[flagged]
- 14 3mo agoThis post is the definition of why I like HN. You never know what random fun and interesting post will make it's way here.
- Markstar 3mo agoYeah, and at the same time it is the reason why I limit myself to scheduled visits so that I don't spend all day reading up on cool stuff instead of working.
- bigcityslider 3mo agoIt feels like 1990s movies were the heaviest on computers/gadgets. Jurassic Park has a programmer as a main character, GoldenEye has two.
- bigcityslider 3mo agoOh, guess Jurassic Park has two programmer main characters if you count the one who knows Unix
- ianbooker 3mo ago> 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.
- bigcityslider 3mo ago7GB 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 :)
- jamesfinlayson 3mo agoVery much less than a AAA game at least. The other day I had a 10GB update for Apex Legends.
- AngryData 3mo agoDepending on tha game you could easily hit 70 gigs on a game today, some over 100. Usually high graphic AAA games. Less HD texture games can still be quite small though.
- daniel-smid 3mo ago[flagged]
- OuterVale 3mo agoA clone of fsn, fsv (File System Visualizer) is available and works on modern Linux. Quite a fun little tool to visualise your storage. https://fsv.sourceforge.net/ https://fsv.sourceforge.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer
- rafaehlers 3mo agoI just vibe-coded a loosely inspired version using WebGL with GPT 5.6 Sol available here https://github.com/rafaehlers/fsn https://github.com/rafaehlers/fsn
- wanda 3mo ago> 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.
- amccollum 3mo agoMy 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.
- kalleboo 3mo agoIf 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qicQUvSUbPM
- krabizzwainch 3mo agoI absolutely knew who made this video before clicking on the link too
- _def 3mo agoHow was the syncing actually achieved?
- toast0 3mo agoYou 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genlock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genlock
- nttylock 3mo ago[flagged]
- bmitc 3mo agoThere 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.
- BrenBarn 3mo agoI 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!)
- ericzawo 3mo agoI 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!
- Boardingmaybe 3mo agoThis the the type of content I live for!
- brandrick 3mo agoThis is great - lovely detail.
- nallerooth 3mo agofabiensanglard - 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.
- fabiensanglard 3mo agoThank you :) !
- amelius 3mo agoAh back in those days computers were still cheap.
- criticas 3mo agoLol, not compared to what they paid us :-)
- theo00 3mo agonice
- walrus01 3mo agoBiggest lesson of Jurassic Park: Don't hire only one sysadmin
- exhumet 3mo agoshould force my company to watch it with that in mind lol
- TechRemarker 3mo agoIn 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.
- ricardobeat 3mo agoSafari is riddled with bugs in the beta, nothing websites can do about it.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- 986aignan 3mo agoI 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: curl 'https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/00_11_15_Apple_Powerbook_100.webp' \ -H 'Referer: https://fabiensanglard.net/' vs. just curl 'https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/00_11_15_Apple_Powerbook_100.webp' The latter gives a 403.
- monolabs 3mo agoThis is incredibly insightful!
- samso26 3mo ago[dead]
- samso26 3mo ago[dead]
- alexpotato 3mo agoIf 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. https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/ https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
- j5r5myk 3mo agoI 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.
- sgt 3mo agoThis is so cool that we need a new HN feature for this like a 'gold bar'. Dang can you build this?
- MWil 3mo ago"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).
- nobleach 3mo agoWe 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....
- somat 3mo agoSo... 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.
- nobleach 3mo agoMatrix 2 had Trinity using a well known nmap hack at the command line! I like that attention to detail.
- prohobo 3mo agoThe 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.
- nihilist_t21 3mo agoHey 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.
- fabiensanglard 3mo agoYou have to force-refresh with Cmd + Shift + R. I don't know why Chrome caches it despite the .html being updated.
- rawoul 3mo agoThe http response headers from your server tells the browser to cache the page for 3 days. Either reduce this 3 days value or add ‘nocache’ in the Cache-Control header to tell the browser to validate the cache with a request every time the page is loaded.
- pivo 3mo agoMy 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"
- laidoffamazon 3mo agoThat’s amazing! I live next to their former office. Do you know which theater they rented out?
- pivo 3mo agoIt was a long time ago so I can't say for certain, but she and I both remember it being the Kendall Sq. cinema.
- Hizonner 3mo agoThe line at my workplace was "It's a Unix system... WE'RE SCREWED!"
- dhosek 3mo ago“It’s a Unix system. I know this.” was definitely the line from the movie most quoted in online spaces in the 90s.
- cortesoft 3mo agoI still quote this line at work all the time. Basically whenever anyone asks me if I know how to do something on the computer
- kraquepype 3mo agoI 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.
- MWil 3mo agoI 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.
- MWil 3mo agoSpielberg 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.
- ipdashc 3mo ago> 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
- bArray 3mo agoI 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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfiQYRn7fBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfiQYRn7fBg
- BearOso 3mo agoI 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.
- fabiensanglard 3mo agoI am ambivalent about this. When I watch the sequence it looks like the guy in the harbor looks at the camera?
- BearOso 3mo agoNedry doesn't have a camera on his end, and he's talking through a headset. Maybe guy at the harbor just knows where the closed circuit camera is? Since it's just quicktime anyway, I guess we'll never know what they intended it to be unless someone asks the director.
- MattCruikshank 3mo agoI 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.
- danielvaughn 3mo agoAccording 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.
- fabiensanglard 3mo agoI noticed that too but elected to not make it count.
- JohnMakin 3mo agoThe 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.
- vt240 3mo agoI 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. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LQyhSI56gU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LQyhSI56gU
- jensenbox 3mo agoMinor typo fix "SuperMach" > "SuperMatch
- tug2024 3mo ago[dead]
- xbar 3mo agoAbout once a year I go on a journey to buy an Iris Crimson. I found an Onyx once but it sold an hour before I got there.
- theodric 3mo agoI am lying on a bed in a house paid for in full by the obsession with Unix and SGI that this movie instilled in me as a child