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!)
Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
111–120 of 278 posts
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#112> 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
Life finds a way
Thank you! What a beautiful and appropriate meta comment!
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hi…
> ... "Creighton" ...
Do you mean Michael Crichton, the author of the original book?
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#115It 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 :)
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)
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#116I 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.
One of the greatest "bad" writers. On my top ten.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hi…
> ... "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)
Surely. The name is pronounced like Creighton.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#119I 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!
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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