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Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

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Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#101

Post by mike_hearn »

RetroTechie wrote: post #82
ColdStream wrote: post #47

Earlier 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?

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.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#102

Post by kalleboo »

dlcarrier wrote: post #55
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#103

Post by wanda »

> 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.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#104

Post by amccollum »

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.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#105

Post by SyzygyRhythm »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #5

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.

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).

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#107

Post by Intermernet »

decimalenough wrote: post #60
smaili wrote: post #4

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 :)

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!

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#109

Post by Arn_Thor »

gdubs wrote: post #36

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 t…

Also, the indoor park "tour" voiceover refers to "Thinking Machine supercomputers", which I never figured were a brand name until today!

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#110

Post by kalleboo »

amccollum wrote: post #104

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…

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
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