> 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.
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.
I don't know if I'm unique in this, but I find myself asking people I know about things that I know I can easily lookup faster. At this point it's more a social ritual than actual information gathering.
> 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
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.
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:
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:)
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?
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!).
> 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."
"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.
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)
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.
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
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.
Much 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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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)
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Wasn't the Amiga essentially limited to interlaced video?
No, it supported very high res screens too, but it required special screens such as the A2024 (15" 1024x1024!) Later on there were also RTG graphics cards available.
> Did they have an equivalent to QuickTime and Cinepak in 1992 to play video clips?
The Amiga's graphics were ahead of its time, but the tradeoffs they chose proved very unsuitable for video playback applications (specifically the planar nature.) There eventually did exist video playback tools, but they either assumed the presence of an RTG card, or post-dated the death of the Amiga by several decades.
The monitor is quite unique in that it contains an internal framebuffer which is controlled via the RGBI lines of the video port [...] The monitor manages to achieve the high resolutions by effectively buffering four Amiga screens, whereby each screen displays a portion of the overall picture. Because of this, the "effective" refresh rate decreases to around 10-15Hz (software configurable). [...] It seems that the monitor by be able to individually refresh the separate quadrants of the screen, as the quadrant which contains the mouse cursor appears to be updated more frequently
What an amazing hack! Reminds me of the lengths people went to add larger external displays to the early 9" Macs using SCSI graphics cards that basically re-implemented QuickDraw
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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..)
The Indy was a very popular platform for building an early web presence. I know, because I used it for multiple, major media companies who were getting onto the train.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They were offered one mass-market opportunity on a silver platter, which they took: When Nintendo asked them to design the N64 GPU. It didn't seem to be very profitable for them.
It'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.
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.
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 :)
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?
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.
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!)
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.
> 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
IMO this is the social internet at its best. Pretty obscure question answered relatively quickly with answer and source.
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.
I don't know if I'm unique in this, but I find myself asking people I know about things that I know I can easily lookup faster. At this point it's more a social ritual than actual information gathering.
It's just like we evolved to be social creatures!
Thanks, I am going to update the article!
Life finds a way
Thank you! What a beautiful and appropriate meta comment!
>part of Capgemini Invent
rip
> 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
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.
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
How was the syncing actually achieved?
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
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:)
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...
It’s a real classic. An amazing article super worth reading (and re-reading if it’s been a while) and almost infinitely quotable.
Also, the indoor park "tour" voiceover refers to "Thinking Machine supercomputers", which I never figured were a brand name until today!
Thinking Machines: "We are building a machine that will be proud of us."
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).
It’s so lame they changed the LEDs to meaning nothing.
On the upside, this means you can run the LED boards without the rest of the CM-5. Have one panel that still works.
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?
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
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."
> ... "Creighton" ...
Do you mean Michael Crichton, the author of the original book?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(novel)
Yes, my mistake!
Surely. The name is pronounced like Creighton.
The name rhymes with "frighten".
Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/crich...
Also a Source: Name is Scottish origin, I live in Scotland.
I mixed up German and English pronunciation of "ei". The German one sounds like English "i", so it would be Crighton.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
He even wrote a non fictional book on Personal Computers back in 1983 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Life
On the other hand he also did a ‘climate change is fake’ book (state of fear).
That was a really, really bad book. By that time it feels like he was a shadow of his former page-turning self.
It was kind of scary how prescient Jurassic Park was. Just swap genetics for AI and his warnings are incredibly applicable to modern times.
Much 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.
That’s an amazing connection, had no idea they were written by the same person but the underlying theme is pretty consistent.
Dolly, the cloned sheep. That was huge in the news.
One of the greatest "bad" writers. On my top ten.
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!
> 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.
Biggest lesson of Jurassic Park: Don't hire only one sysadmin
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
It feels like 1990s movies were the heaviest on computers/gadgets. Jurassic Park has a programmer as a main character, GoldenEye has two.
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/
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
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 :)
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.
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.
Rock? You were lucky! We used to have to hand pick our zeros and ones from sparse clouds of hydrogen and helium!
Sometimes we didn’t even have ones, I wrote a whole database once using only zeros. - dilbert
god forbid if you got a parahydrogen vs a orthohydrogen hydrogen. That reverse spin really messed up the 1's.
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)
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...
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.
Safari is riddled with bugs in the beta, nothing websites can do about it.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Wasn't the Amiga essentially limited to interlaced video?
No, it supported very high res screens too, but it required special screens such as the A2024 (15" 1024x1024!) Later on there were also RTG graphics cards available.
> Did they have an equivalent to QuickTime and Cinepak in 1992 to play video clips?
The Amiga's graphics were ahead of its time, but the tradeoffs they chose proved very unsuitable for video playback applications (specifically the planar nature.) There eventually did exist video playback tools, but they either assumed the presence of an RTG card, or post-dated the death of the Amiga by several decades.
Thanks for the reply!
I looked up the A2024
The monitor is quite unique in that it contains an internal framebuffer which is controlled via the RGBI lines of the video port [...] The monitor manages to achieve the high resolutions by effectively buffering four Amiga screens, whereby each screen displays a portion of the overall picture. Because of this, the "effective" refresh rate decreases to around 10-15Hz (software configurable). [...] It seems that the monitor by be able to individually refresh the separate quadrants of the screen, as the quadrant which contains the mouse cursor appears to be updated more frequently
What an amazing hack! Reminds me of the lengths people went to add larger external displays to the early 9" Macs using SCSI graphics cards that basically re-implemented QuickDraw
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?
Hammond spared no expense except when it came to Nedry, which was a critical mistake.
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).
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.
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.
Right. I just mean that macs running pre-Darwin Mac OS seem an odd choice.
They’re an odd choice now. Back then they would have made sense as a UI to the Unix machines.
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.
The early web was born on the back of Mac's connecting to SGI machines...
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.
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..)
That's a waste for an SGI machine. SGI's were mainly known for 3D stuff.
The Indy was a very popular platform for building an early web presence. I know, because I used it for multiple, major media companies who were getting onto the train.
true. the book was written before Windows was released.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
SGI machines mostly cost a lot of money for the 3D graphics hardware. They didn't make much sense for other purposes.
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.
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.
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.
Why? Hybrid systems were and still are common. Today a common IT setup is Macs connecting to UNIX servers over the network.
Same. I'd have chosen some of those new Xerox Parc bad boys.
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
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.
And I was worried I wasn't going to have anything to read tonight.
This is why I love the internet! Thank you to the author for taking the time!
Yeah this reminded me of “the good old days” of the internet when every site felt like this :)
Ah back in those days computers were still cheap.
This is incredibly insightful!
This is great - lovely detail.
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.
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
In the 2nd image (clearest) and other images, there appears to be some binary encoding in red. It must encode something!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
They were offered one mass-market opportunity on a silver platter, which they took: When Nintendo asked them to design the N64 GPU. It didn't seem to be very profitable for them.
It'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.
Hubris. And Microsoft.
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.
It's a shame that HPE doesn't make graphics workstations any more.
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
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 :)
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?
And yet, downvoting is still working within seconds of my commenting! Rock on HN, never change.
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.
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.
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
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!)
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.
Im curious how they got the digital version of Jaws to play on a computer in... 1992?
By ripping it to Cinepak or MPEG from a VHS capture?
Well, you know, a computer had to have been involved in that digital version of Jaws ..
Another good Jurassic Park content is this filming locations video. Almost everything can still be visited today https://youtu.be/34r8Ypxzkk4
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
Fabien did a code review of Trespasser back in 2014: https://fabiensanglard.net/trespasser/index.php
Oh very cool, thanks for the link
https://www.jurassicsystems.com/
Guess my OS?
“It’s a Unix system. … I know this” XD
Back in the days when it was an MS-DOS world…
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!"
plan9, obviously, philistine!
nice
note that gr_osview has been reincarnated as xosview (available on most unix distros, a simple apt-get away on buntu)