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?
Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
81–90 of 278 posts
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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?
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#83Another 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
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#84Generally 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…
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?
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#85It feels like 1990s movies were the heaviest on computers/gadgets. Jurassic Park has a programmer as a main character, GoldenEye has two.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#86> 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.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#87I 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.
On the other hand he also did a ‘climate change is fake’ book (state of fear).
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#88This 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.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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?
Hubris. And Microsoft.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...