Jurassic Park computer system in the browser

http://www.jurassicsystems.com/

by tojr • 12 years ago

314 82 12 years ago

jurassicsystems.com

edgeman273• 12 years ago

It's a Unix system. I know this.

alex_anglin• 12 years ago

Except that the 'Ah Ah Ah You didn't say the magic word' sequence shows up on a Mac desktop.

S_A_P• 12 years ago

That movie was ahead of its time and predicted a unix based Mac OS. Prophetic indeed Newman!

SkyMarshal• 12 years ago

http://reddit.com/r/itsaunixsystem

There's a subreddit for everything.

fennecfoxen• 12 years ago

how do I launch fsn?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fsn

edgeman273• 12 years ago

I like the irony of the site telling me not to use Safari.

freshyill2• 12 years ago

Another day on Hacker News, another interesting project where the author hasn't heard of Modernizr.

kalleboo2• 12 years ago

Ironically, it is using Modernizr.

    <script src="/js/lib/modernizr-2.6.2.min.js"></script>

Seems like whoever created it had trouble with HTML5 audio though...

qrohlf2• 12 years ago

Just sent a PR that fixes this. https://github.com/tojrobinson/jurassicsystems.com/pull/4

simon1246• 12 years ago

legit

shalander• 12 years ago

You didn't say the magic word!

yashg• 12 years ago

Where's the 3D model to lock/unlock the doors?

edgeman273• 12 years ago

https://github.com/tojrobinson/jurassicsystems.com/issues/2

malux852• 12 years ago

Wow! This is cool.

The computers in Jurassic Park is what got me into programming when I was young. I saw their 3D weather overlay when the storm was approaching and thought "THAT IS IT!". I was 8 years old at the time.

I was determined to learn and create that system - I started learning C, so that I could open and close files. I learnt OpenGL so that I could create the 3D scene. I learnt socket programming so that I could download weather images from the NOAA.

It took me until I was 15 (I was totally self taught and it took me a while before I could learn all of the vector / matrix math myself) but I ended up building it! I made a program in C that downloaded the weather jpg, cleaned it up (removed noise, removed the NOAA logo, smoothed out the clouds) then generated a heightmap in OpenGL, and made a fly-over.

I wish I still had the code, it's sitting on my old computer at the Farm in New Zealand :<

dorfuss• 12 years ago

I'd love to see that! :)

malux852• 12 years ago

me too, I want it back now! ... I was just remembering what a PITA it was programming when I was younger - no internet at home meant I had to read the code of similar programs to try and figure out how to do things.

Every day I'd come home with a box of floppy disks full of open source programs to read, and satellite jpgs downloaded from the noaa website.

later on I got internet access and that's when I hooked it up live ... good old NZ Farm internet : 0.5kb/s because our electric fences caused so much electrical interference with the phone lines ....

NAFV_P2• 12 years ago

The computers in Jurassic Park is what got me into programming when I was young. I saw their 3D weather overlay when the storm was approaching and thought "THAT IS IT!". I was 8 years old at the time.

I'm guessing you would be around 28-30 years old, so I'm a couple of years or more older ... but I started learning C when I was 31, currently I'm interested in stuff like parsers and data structures (I really should look at sockets soon). Perhaps I'm just too old to hack.

I wish I still had the code, it's sitting on my old computer at the Farm in New Zealand :<

I bet a fair few people on HN would be interested in it as well, it sounds quite hardcore.

doorhammer3• 12 years ago

Warning: anecdotes and unsubstantiated speculation ahead

Did you do any programming at all before 31?

I don't think you're ever too old to do anything, personally. I was 26 (which isn't terribly old, admittedly, but definitely past the little kid age) when I talked to a friend who was a professional programmer and decided "huh, I like computers and solving problems. I'm going to do that." I hadn't programmed before then, though I was computer savvy, I guess. I also have a degree in sociology, heh.

Took me about four years, but now I have a corporate job doing full stack .net work in C#/MVC, I've done side projects in ruby, and I do some C, Haskell, and python on the side. I'm also working my way through The Algorithm Design manual and have Concrete Mathematics to work through later on.

I always got really discouraged because I constantly see and hear about people who started programming when they were five, or eight, or something like that, and I'd think "no way could I get into it that deeply, starting so late" but that's just totally untrue. I'm finally at a point where I think "given the desire and time, I can learn whatever comp sci topic I want," so I get discouraged less.

I think part of it has to do with notions of talent, and natural abilities. When I was a kid, I took for granted that something would be hard until I learned it. I don't remember learning most of the basic skills I have, so I forget that things can be difficult starting out. Every topic I've started learning and stuck with in programming has pretty fully integrated itself into the core of how I think about the topic. One for-example would be immutable data structures as they're implemented in Clojure, or functional programming in general.

Anyway, that's a rambling tl:dr for: stick with it. You're never too old. You just have to try that much harder to catch up initially, but if you can teach yourself to keep learning now, you've got an extra skill a lot of people don't have, which is learning how to learn as an adult. I think it's the most valuable skill I have right now.

(ps I'm making a lot of assumptions in this post; sorry if any of them are way off base)

pyrocat• 12 years ago

Perhaps I'm just too old to hack.

No such thing.

zeidrich• 12 years ago

I'm 31. When I was 9, I wanted to copy Ultima, my dad had a copy of Visual Basic so I learned how to use that and made an RPG engine. When I was 11 or 12 I started getting frustrated with the performance of VB/QBasic (this is before we had Internet access, so reference material was sparse) but I had a copy of the programmer's guide to the IBM PC and PS/2 and managed to figure out how to use assembler to draw in mode 13h in BASIC. As I got on to be about 14-15, I started to try to use higher resolution modes and had real challenges with drivers, and moved on to using Pascal and C. I bought a Borland C++ package, it was hundreds of dollars.

My point to all of that is that, in the end, those experiences meant very little to me now. They were indicative of the kind of person I am, and they are pretty cool to look back on and brag about, but in the end, they don't really make me better at any specific programming task. If I were to have not had the same resources to try to do those things, I would probably not be significantly better or worse. I would have spent my time trying to take apart electronics or learning a language or something instead, developed my problem solving skills and semantic skills in other areas. Maybe a little bit less experience, but in the end I think I would not be significantly impacted.

The reason that people might fear that starting late holds them back is because they might not be the kind of person who, even with access to the tools and resources, would be interested in taking things apart and finding out how they worked to start with.

If you can say at this point that you're interested in stuff like parsers and data structures, then that's awesome. If you're interested in it and you want to learn more, you will learn more, and you will succeed. If on the other hand you are uninterested but think that programming is a smart career path, you'll probably do poorly.

bch• 12 years ago

No, _your story_ is cool. Its amazing how dogged a kid with a vision can be. This sort of attitude and environment needs to be passed on to future programmers, and preserved in the current ones. Kudos.

yammada• 12 years ago

Nice!

I was lucky enough to have the pleasure of working with a few of the smart folks who were responsible for those weather visualizations.

They were created by a little known startup in Minneapolis, Minnesota called EarthWatch Communications. At the time they were creating 3D displays of weather data long before such visualizations were commonplace on every TV weather forecast.

talkingquickly• 12 years ago

that's an awesome story. Currently compiling a blog post series of interviews with people who have interesting stories about how they learned to code, would be great to interview you! If you're interested my emails ben at talkingquickly co uk

tylermauthe• 12 years ago

Some other commands...

access main security system please
display zebraGirl.jpg

sonnyz• 12 years ago

system Raptor

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

Really nice recreation. Why the annoying dialog repeatedly telling me not to use Safari though? It seemed to work fine for me in Safari.

kalleboo2• 12 years ago

Seems it shows up each time the site tries to play short audio clips. See starting line 32 in http://www.jurassicsystems.com/js/jurassicSystems.js Instead of feature detection it'll use HTML5 audio in Chrome, show an annoying dialog in Safari, and an SWF fallback for anything else.

edit: Here's the GitHub issue for it https://github.com/tojrobinson/jurassicsystems.com/issues/1

qrohlf2• 12 years ago

Hopefully this will be fixed with https://github.com/tojrobinson/jurassicsystems.com/pull/4

bhouston• 12 years ago

SGI IRIX operating system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX

I used that at my first programming internship at university. Even then (1999) it was a dated OS, but it was still fun it.

I wonder if they used IRIX in the movie because the VFX guys making the movie, ILM, were doing all the VFX work using Softimage on SGI machines running IRIX at the time.

rrhyne• 12 years ago

I recognized it as well from working in SoftImage, PowerAnimator (became maya) and Houdini on these systems.

ghaff• 12 years ago

Apparently the specific "It's a Unix system" scene used an experimental fsn (file system navigator) that SGI developed but which was never released as a product.

fit2rule• 12 years ago

It was released on one of the Indie demo disks that SGI liked to hand out at conferences and subscribers and so on .. the source is still around, and of course there are a few clones by now: http://fsv.sourceforge.net/

mhurron• 12 years ago

It was included with IRIX 5 but dropped in IRIX 6.

vidarh3• 12 years ago

It was released. The university I went to had a computer lab full of SGI Indy's that they'd gotten really cheap from the distributor, and they all had the 3d navigator installed.

angersock2• 12 years ago

Yeah, good memories.

SGI machines were beautiful, full stop.

michael_h• 12 years ago

I have an SGI Octane at home. It weighs 55 pounds.

dmm• 12 years ago

Pour one out for IRIX, discontinued December 31, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX#Retirement

famousactress• 12 years ago

Haha! My mom was a Sun reseller who sold them a bunch of Sparc stations for the movies and I think even wrote some shell scripts to launch some spinning 3D dino-skull scripts on startup, etc. Around this time we were a pretty rare family home with one of those boxes and an ISDN line at home as the family computer.

Aqueous2• 12 years ago

The Jurassic Park Computer System...created and maintained by Newman. Credit where credit is due: it takes a lot of skills to keep a bunch of velociraptors pent up using a Macintosh LC II.

What always amused me is that in order to trigger the locks, the "computer whiz" girl had to navigate some sort of 3d control environment, probably the most ineffective way possible to control something that should be random access.

devopstom• 12 years ago

That was IRIX's File System Navigator http://www.javipas.com/wp-content/_FSN.png

rcruzeiro• 12 years ago

She navigated the file system using fsn (which by the way existed. it just never catch on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn)

Aqueous2• 12 years ago

I thought it was so cheesy that it had to be fictional, because of all the misrepresentations of computer interfaces in other movies like "Hackers." This is apparently a common assumption.

It's admirable that SGI was experimenting with interfaces. However in this situation having to navigate such an interface created a very real safety hazard. I suppose she could have used the regular file browser instead - or perhaps the substantially less exciting XTerm.

kisielk• 12 years ago

There's an open source implementation called fsv:

http://fsv.sourceforge.net/

DanBC• 12 years ago

There is a collection of 3D interfaces here http://nooface.net/3dui.shtml

With modern GPUs and processing power these could be made silky smooth. Still mostly pointless, which is a shame.

ry0ohki• 12 years ago

Macintosh LC II

It's actually a Quadra 700. Business class all the way at Jurassic Park.

citizenk• 12 years ago

We spared no expense.

angelgcuartero• 12 years ago

I used to work with some Silicon Graphics in the 90's in a F-18 Simulator for Spanish DoD. We used C with GL (the graphic library that existed before OpenGL) and had Indigo² workstations for each developer. Origin and Onyx were used for calculation and visualization. When they offered me that job I couldn't refuse! I was like "Yes! I'm going to use the same computers that appeared in Jurassic Park!!!" :D

cessor• 12 years ago

Did anybody notice the picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer next to the screen? Details, my friends...

guiomie• 12 years ago

What is the hidden feature ?

mobra• 12 years ago

"access please" with double space between words

bronson• 12 years ago

Well, it's meant to be "access (pretty much anything) please".

access main computer system please

access local security grid please

access yer mom please

That said, it's more fun to get it wrong...

filmgirlcw• 12 years ago

As a kid, this was my dream system. This is so great.

astrojams• 12 years ago

This brings me so much joy. This movie - the SGI and this scene in particular made me want to switch from being a business major to a computer science major in college. I did and it was the right decision.

I bought an SGI Indy and spent a lot of time in the shell just so it would look and feel like the scene from this movie. I don't know why it affected me so much but it did.

So much love for the author who create this simulator.

basicallydan• 12 years ago

You should've seen the grin on my face when Newman's smug little face started speaking to me. You've fulfilled a childhood dream for me, thank you.

banachtarski• 12 years ago

The zebra girl is a nice touch.

hcarvalhoalves• 12 years ago

The cool thing about Jurassic Park is that it showcases all this high-end tech (at the time) to set the mood. The setting of this movie made a huge impact on me as a kid.

In the computer room scene you can see a CM-5 [1] from Thinking Machines in the background (or at least, only the front panels with the futuristic blinking red leds). Those were very interesting computers when launched, with a fundamentally different architecture for parallel computing.

Also, fun story: the company hired Richard Feynman [2].

[1] http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/images/hwd_jpark9...

[2] http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

cmatteri• 12 years ago

Play this song for the full experience http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQuH4woPDn0

trekky1700• 12 years ago

Having loved this movie since childhood, this was really awesome.

erlkonig• 12 years ago

I used fsn on the SGIs in 1994/5, but I think this initially free (as in beer) program was later bundled with some for-pay package and vanished from the downloads area.

The funny part is I probably still have a working copy of it on the SGI Onyx in my garage.

capkutay• 12 years ago

Weird I can't get into the security system..

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

1993. Jurassic Park is old enough to drink in a bar.

nullc• 12 years ago

Funny, I don't remember that "you must install flash player" from the movie.

denibertovic• 12 years ago

We have a SGI machine (wights like ton) in our shop. Can't remember the exact model but I remember how someone mentioned it's the exact model used for animation in the movie....we use it mostly as a chair XD

Jurassic Park computer system in the browser

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