31–40 of 80 posts
The circuit breaker from the restoring power scene is real too: https://www.google.com/search?q=westinghouse+spb-100&udm=2
I love Jurassic Park, the movie, because it was so wildly ahead of its time in so many ways. Also, mandatory https://jurassicsystems.com .
> It's the design mock up from the final presentation to Motorola for the iRadio (name later changed to Envoy). > The head of frogdesign, Hartmut Esslinger met Spielberg on a plane and showed him this mockup. Steven asked if it could be used as a prop in the film, and Hartmut gave it to him.
Wow, Motorola had an iRadio before Apple released their first iPhone? I did not know that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(internet_appliance)>
https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/cisco-infogear-iphon...>
The circuit breaker from the restoring power scene is real too: https://www.google.com/search?q=westinghouse+spb-100&udm=2
As is the supercomputer. It's the Thinking Machine Connection Machine CM-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine https://www.jurassic-pedia.com/cm-5-thinking-machine/ The LED panel is gorgeous: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Ko4qBkEcBM A lot of people have replicated or restored these: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qm6w57ZcJZQ https://www.housedillon.com/posts/resurrected-led-panels/ --- I've always hoped the…
In Arthur C Clarke’s 2001 a space odyssey, in the book, he describes a flat handheld device that is used for reading the New York Times. He can’t remember the exact details but the ergonomics he describes perfectly encapsulate the tablet devices we have today. I’m pretty certain he wrote it before the 1969 moon landing.
I love stuff like this. Often films and TV shows have anachronisms in them (like the very first episode, IIRC, of Narcos with the clearly very modern touchscreen photocopier where the screen has been covered with a piece of paper, or the BMW that wasn't released until the mid/late 1990s), but every so often you'll see something that is instead a flash of the future. Due to #reasons I watched the sentry gun scene in A…
They have patented the clamshell form, so all the early laptop manufacturers had to license their patent.
GRiD Compass was designed since the beginning with the main goal of being a computer that can be carried in a briefcase (at that time, engineers and programmers normally carried briefcases, not backpacks like today). This was somewhat similar with how the first "scientific" calculator had been designed by Hewlett-Packard, with the main goal of fitting inside a shirt pocket.
There have been a number of earlier portable computers, made by IBM, Xerox, Scrib, Sony, Epson, Osborne and a few others, but most of those were much more cumbersome and more difficult to carry (they were nicknamed "sewing machine" computers, for their size and weight), mainly because they had CRT displays, while GRiD Compass had a beautiful flat electroluminescent display.
Before GRiD Compass, there had also been a few Japanese portable computers with flat LCD screens, but in those the screen could not be folded, the body of the computer was in one piece, containing both the screen and the keyboard, like in an oversized calculator, so their screens were very small and they used very weak CPUs in comparison with GRiD Compass, which had an Intel 8086 (but it was not compatible with the IBM PC, as it was launched when the IBM PC was only 8 months old and not yet as important as it has become later).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean actually the FSV that you refer to is a clone of the SGI IRIX utility, fsn , that was actually depicted on a live computer in the film. SGI was well-known to the film industry, because their IRIX systems were basically the sine qua non of graphics workstations and powerhouses. SGI invested heavily in the graphical capabilities, including 3D rendering, and therefore when the industry graduated from Amigas with…
Poor SGI. I used to love their website back in the 90s. It's strange to think that alternative architectures were possible though and could get such a foothold in some industries. The specificity is mind-blowng. Everything is "PC"s today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s mind-blowing to me that the actual guy who designed it chimed in. Assuming it’s not a fake comment, what are the odds!?
Much greater than now, given the open discoverability of the original post here, versus the walled-off content we have today, locked away in discord servers and the like. Furthermore, the act of replying to that post will have bumped it right back to the top for everyone to see.
On the other hand, small websites and forums can disappear but that openness allows platform like archive.org to capture and "fossilize" them.