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.
Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
41–50 of 278 posts
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#42It 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 t…
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:)
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#43I 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.…
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.
It was kind of scary how prescient Jurassic Park was. Just swap genetics for AI and his warnings are incredibly applicable to modern times.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#44And 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.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#46It 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 t…
It’s so lame they changed the LEDs to meaning nothing.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#47And 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.
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.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#48Guess 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!"
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#49Im curious how they got the digital version of Jaws to play on a computer in... 1992?
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#50> 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.