Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/index.html

by vinhnx • 8 days ago

958 259 8 days ago

tikimcfee• 8 days ago

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

smaili• 8 days 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 :)

decimalenough• 8 days ago

You'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• 8 days ago

Rock? You were lucky! We used to have to hand pick our zeros and ones from sparse clouds of hydrogen and helium!

SoftTalker• 7 days ago

I 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.

ivolimmen2• 8 days ago

I 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...

pjc50• 8 days ago

I 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)

windenntw2• 8 days ago

The 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• 7 days ago

Only 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• 7 days ago

I 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• 7 days ago

Some 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-h3• 8 days 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.

ColdStream5• 8 days 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.

chasd002• 8 days 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• 8 days 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.

jambalaya88• 8 days ago

true. the book was written before Windows was released.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 8 days ago

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

anthk6• 8 days 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.

jambalaya88• 8 days 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-h3• 8 days 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.

RodgerTheGreat• 8 days 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).

kalleboo6• 8 days 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• 7 days 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• 8 days 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• 8 days 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.

pishpash2• 8 days ago

Macintosh and SGI (+AIX, various Unix) were in fact a common combination used as desktop and backend server respectively in many 1990's scientific labs including biology labs.

dlcarrier• 8 days 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• 8 days 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• 8 days 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.

Mountain_Skies• 8 days ago

Hammond spared no expense except when it came to Nedry, which was a critical mistake.

kalleboo6• 8 days ago

Wasn't the Amiga essentially limited to interlaced video? That basically relegated it to a machine for games or realtime NTSC/PAL video effects.

Also I was never a big Amiga guy so I'm not sure, did they have an equivalent to QuickTime and Cinepak in 1992 to play video clips? Microsoft hadn't released Video for Windows yet.

SyzygyRhythm• 8 days 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).

ahartmetz8• 8 days 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• 7 days 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.

yoyohello132• 8 days 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.

jambalaya88• 8 days 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.

yoyohello132• 8 days 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.

msh• 8 days ago

On the other hand he also did a ‘climate change is fake’ book (state of fear).

10729287• 8 days ago

He even wrote a non fictional book on Personal Computers back in 1983 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Life

avadodin• 8 days ago

One of the greatest "bad" writers. On my top ten.

notahacker• 8 days ago

I still remember one of the characters in the book being awestruck by the number of Cray supercomputers the park had, and certain this must mean they were doing something really, really significant

Even by the time of the film regular consumer hardware had reached parity. Now we use more power to run to do list apps

twoodfin• 4 days ago

I did this research once, and actually consumer CPU’s didn’t hit the performance of the original Cray-1 (1976) until roughly the Pentium II (1997).

The Crays used in the fictional Jurassic Park (Y-MP’s?) would have been much more powerful still.

The Cray machines were incredible feats of design and engineering.

mrpippy2• 8 days 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.

fabiensanglard8• 8 days 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?

mrpippy2• 8 days 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...

KasianFranks• 8 days ago

Guess my OS?

bfung• 8 days ago

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

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

ColdStream5• 8 days ago

Just 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!"

Findecanor• 7 days ago

The 3D file browser was one of the demo programs that came pre-installed on SGI machines, at least in the late '90s.

ButlerianJihad• 8 days ago

plan9, obviously, philistine!

ColdStream5• 8 days 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• 8 days 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.

ColdStream5• 8 days ago

Spot 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.

JSR_FDED• 8 days ago

This is true. I was at SGI, and their entire business was optimized to serving the needs of very sophisticated customers who were themselves pushing the envelope. Absolutely great customers to work with. But SGI’s DNA couldn’t adjust to the low margin high volume consumer space.

They built an incredible Windows NT system (for the time) but couldn’t keep up with the 6 month release cycle their competitors were on.

SGI was an incredible place to work while it lasted.

pishpash2• 8 days ago

3dfx and nVidia even put Matrox out of business. The 1990's were a true competitive paradise up and down the stack, not like today.

kalleboo6• 8 days 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

fabiensanglard8• 8 days ago

Thanks, I am going to update the article!

TurdF3rguson• 8 days ago

Life finds a way

vishnugupta• 8 days ago

Thank you! What a beautiful and appropriate meta comment!

ronbenton• 8 days ago

IMO this is the social internet at its best. Pretty obscure question answered relatively quickly with answer and source.

Waterluvian• 8 days ago

AI 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.

tensegrist• 8 days ago

part of Capgemini Invent

rip

RunSet• 7 days ago

https://i.imgur.com/kl90PCH.mp4

rakel_rakel• 8 days 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?

OwlsParlay• 8 days 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• 8 days ago

What 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

mike_hearn5• 8 days ago

A 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_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."

glenstein• 7 days ago

Thanks for the link, and boy is that a whopper. Do my eyes deceive me or is there literally a shot of the computer looking at them from its computery perspective, through its screen, with some layer of visual digital artifacts over it at the 14 second mark?

bigcityslider4• 7 days ago

What about Jurassic Park 2? Never saw it

stevenwoo• 3 days ago

Mr. Robot and Person of Interest(iirc) got a lot of details right.

einsteinx2• 7 days ago

Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers.

It’s funny he said that because when I first saw Jurassic park as a computer nerd kid, I was calling out the “this is UNIX, I know this” scene where she then flies around the file system in a 3d rendered file browser as typical movie computer BS.

Turns out it was a real application running on a real SGI machine, and ironically I was calling it out specifically because of my knowledge of computers (not having any idea about SGI machines at the time but having a ton of experience with DOS and Windows 3.1). My family who didn’t have much computer knowledge didn’t think anything of it.

kalleboo6• 8 days 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

albert_e2• 8 days 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_e2• 8 days 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

aboardRat4• 8 days ago

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

sswn• 8 days ago

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

tomduncalf• 8 days ago

Yeah this reminded me of “the good old days” of the internet when every site felt like this :)

haunter• 8 days ago

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

iamacyborg2• 8 days ago

Not 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

torh• 8 days ago

Fabien did a code review of Trespasser back in 2014: https://fabiensanglard.net/trespasser/index.php

gdubs3• 8 days 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• 8 days 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:)

pdpi• 8 days ago

Then 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...

Mistletoe• 8 days ago

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

ma2t• 8 days ago

On the upside, this means you can run the LED boards without the rest of the CM-5. Have one panel that still works.

pivo3• 7 days ago

I'd heard from my wife who worked at TMs that they did this so engineers would stop "wasting" time programming animations on those lights.

moffkalast• 8 days ago

The funniest part about this thing is that it seems to have had roughly the same performance of a modern day CM5 (the Raspberry kind).

joshu• 8 days ago

Thinking Machines: "We are building a machine that will be proud of us."

Arn_Thor• 8 days ago

Also, the indoor park "tour" voiceover refers to "Thinking Machine supercomputers", which I never figured were a brand name until today!

pnw2• 7 days ago

Great video. I visited Brewster Kahle at Thinking Machines back when I was in college and that visit ended up being one of the major influences in my career. The CM was way ahead of it's time.

Thinking Machines also pioneered WAIS which was a precursor to modern search engines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Information_Server

gdubs3• 7 days ago

Thank you! My biggest regret in the video is I didn't get to touch on Brewster Kahle's involvement – especially given what he's gone on to do with Internet Archive. Would love to do a followup.

Re: Search Engines, I think I mention this in the video but apparently Sergey Brin was part of the Connection Machine user community, and had that experience on his resume. (A copy of that is still floating around.)

Kye• 7 days ago

Do you think it's coincidence the chip for Skynet looks so much like the Connection Machine?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UZeHJyiMG8

gdubs3• 7 days ago

Probably not! I'd imagine that whoever did production design for the movie would have visited some of the labs of the time, or talked to people involved in AI – and the CM-1 / CM-2 were very much at the forefront of that type of computing back then.

But that's such a great find – I've seen T2 many times, but that visual of the black hypercube-looking design really is strikingly similar!

ChrisArchitect2• 8 days ago

https://www.jurassicsystems.com/

korse• 7 days ago

This 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.

ChrisArchitect2• 8 days 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

nanolith• 8 days 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.

superxpro12• 8 days ago

Im curious how they got the digital version of Jaws to play on a computer in... 1992?

MomsAVoxell7• 8 days ago

Well, you know, a computer had to have been involved in that digital version of Jaws ..

MWil5• 7 days ago

And a certain director...

anthk6• 8 days ago

By ripping it to Cinepak or MPEG from a VHS capture?

JeremyHerrman• 8 days 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• 7 days ago

My family owned a Mac Portable (the backlit model). Running Word for Mac 5.1, it was a fantastic writing machine.

sedatk• 8 days ago

When 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

ivolimmen2• 8 days ago

This 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• 7 days ago

There's always NsCDE which should run on modern Linux. Haven't tried it myself.

https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

jzer0cool• 8 days ago

In the 2nd image (clearest) and other images, there appears to be some binary encoding in red. It must encode something!

npunt• 8 days ago

Another 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

windenntw2• 8 days ago

Protip: 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 :)

rcarmo2• 8 days ago

I 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?

rcarmo2• 8 days ago

And yet, downvoting is still working within seconds of my commenting! Rock on HN, never change.

ur-whale• 8 days ago

note that gr_osview has been reincarnated as xosview (available on most unix distros, a simple apt-get away on buntu)

14• 8 days ago

This 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• 8 days ago

Yeah, 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.

bigcityslider4• 8 days ago

It feels like 1990s movies were the heaviest on computers/gadgets. Jurassic Park has a programmer as a main character, GoldenEye has two.

bigcityslider4• 7 days ago

Oh, guess Jurassic Park has two programmer main characters if you count the one who knows Unix

ianbooker• 8 days 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.

bigcityslider4• 7 days ago

7GB 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• 7 days ago

Very much less than a AAA game at least. The other day I had a 10GB update for Apex Legends.

AngryData• 6 days ago

Depending 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.

OuterVale• 8 days ago

A 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer

rafaehlers• 5 days ago

I just vibe-coded a loosely inspired version using WebGL with GPT 5.6 Sol available here https://github.com/rafaehlers/fsn

wanda• 8 days 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• 8 days ago

My 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.

kalleboo6• 8 days ago

If 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

krabizzwainch• 7 days ago

I absolutely knew who made this video before clicking on the link too

_def• 8 days ago

How was the syncing actually achieved?

toast02• 7 days ago

You 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

fabiensanglard8• 7 days ago

What a cool anecdote. I have added it to the article!

bmitc• 8 days ago

There 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• 8 days ago

I 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• 8 days ago

I 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!

brandrick• 8 days ago

This is great - lovely detail.

nallerooth• 8 days ago

fabiensanglard - 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.

fabiensanglard8• 7 days ago

Thank you :) !

amelius• 8 days ago

Ah back in those days computers were still cheap.

criticas3• 7 days ago

Lol, not compared to what they paid us :-)

theo00• 8 days ago

nice

walrus01• 8 days ago

Biggest lesson of Jurassic Park: Don't hire only one sysadmin

exhumet• 7 days ago

should force my company to watch it with that in mind lol

TechRemarker• 8 days ago

In 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.

ricardobeat2• 7 days ago

Safari is riddled with bugs in the beta, nothing websites can do about it.

986aignan• 7 days ago

I 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• 8 days ago

This is incredibly insightful!

alexpotato• 8 days ago

If 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/

j5r5myk• 7 days ago

I 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• 7 days ago

This is so cool that we need a new HN feature for this like a 'gold bar'. Dang can you build this?

MWil5• 7 days 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).

xattt• 7 days ago

Or since the equipment was on loan, the marketers requested hero shots of the equipment.

MWil5• 7 days ago

I know I'm being a Crichton/Spielberg fanboy when I ask for the lore equivalent of Occam's Razor - isn't it more likely my favorite creators did this most impressively??

nobleach2• 7 days ago

We 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....

somat2• 7 days ago

So... 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.

nobleach2• 6 days ago

Matrix 2 had Trinity using a well known nmap hack at the command line! I like that attention to detail.

prohobo• 7 days ago

The 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• 7 days ago

Hey 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.

fabiensanglard8• 7 days ago

You have to force-refresh with Cmd + Shift + R. I don't know why Chrome caches it despite the .html being updated.

rawoul• 7 days ago

The 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.

pivo3• 7 days ago

My 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• 7 days ago

That’s amazing! I live next to their former office. Do you know which theater they rented out?

pivo3• 7 days ago

It 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• 7 days ago

The line at my workplace was "It's a Unix system... WE'RE SCREWED!"

dhosek• 7 days 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• 7 days ago

I 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• 7 days ago

I 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.

fabiensanglard8• 7 days ago

This is such a cool anecdote. I have added it to the page!

dmurvihill• 6 days ago

Love that theatre

MWil5• 7 days ago

I 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.

MWil5• 7 days ago

Spielberg 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• 7 days 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• 7 days ago

I 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

Boardingmaybe• 7 days ago

This the the type of content I live for!

BearOso2• 7 days ago

I 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.

fabiensanglard8• 7 days ago

I am ambivalent about this. When I watch the sequence it looks like the guy in the harbor looks at the camera?

BearOso2• 7 days ago

Nedry 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• 7 days ago

I 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• 7 days ago

According 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.

fabiensanglard8• 7 days ago

I noticed that too but elected to not make it count.

JohnMakin• 7 days ago

The 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• 7 days ago

I 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

jensenbox• 7 days ago

Minor typo fix "SuperMach" > "SuperMatch

xbar• 7 days ago

About 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• 7 days ago

I 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

Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

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