6 ms·

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

• ColdStream 3mo 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.
  • chasd00 3mo ago
    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.
• LeoPanthera 3mo 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.
  • jambalaya8 3mo ago
    true. the book was written before Windows was released.
    • bradyd 3mo ago
      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.
      • jambalaya8 3mo ago
        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.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 3mo ago
    Right. I just mean that macs running pre-Darwin Mac OS seem an odd choice.
    • MomsAVoxell 3mo ago
      They’re an odd choice now. Back then they would have made sense as a UI to the Unix machines.
      • anthk 3mo ago
        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.
        • aa-jv 3mo ago
          The early web was born on the back of Mac's connecting to SGI machines...
          • deleted 3mo ago
            [deleted]
          • ahartmetz 3mo ago
            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.
            • aa-jv 3mo ago
              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..)
  • anthk 3mo ago
    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.
• jambalaya8 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
      Same. I'd have chosen some of those new Xerox Parc bad boys.
    • mike_hearn 3mo ago
      Why? Hybrid systems were and still are common. Today a common IT setup is Macs connecting to UNIX servers over the network.
      • jambalaya8 3mo ago
        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.
        • mike_hearn 3mo ago
          That came later as Windows became dominant but in the era Jurassic Park was written/filmed in, I think they were used for industrial and scientific uses as well.
          • jambalaya8 3mo ago
            Some of it was probably chosen to make it seem expensive. And back then, they were seen as probably the priciest computer the average American might have recognition of, while being somewhat exotic compared to the IBM and IBM knockoffs.
• RodgerTheGreat 3mo 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).
• kalleboo 3mo 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
  • rconti 3mo ago
    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.
• yellowapple 3mo 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 3mo 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.
    • ahartmetz 3mo ago
      SGI machines mostly cost a lot of money for the 3D graphics hardware. They didn't make much sense for other purposes.
      • criticas 3mo ago
        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.
    • ColdStream 3mo 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.
  • pishpash 3mo ago
• dlcarrier 3mo ago
  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.
  • veltas 3mo ago
    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?
  • dmurray 3mo ago
    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.
• SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
  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).
  • ahartmetz 3mo ago
    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.
• wazoox 3mo ago
  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.