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Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

fabiensanglard.net

121–130 of 278 posts

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#121

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 (…

I don't think that it makes much economic sense. That hardware was extremely expensive at the time, developer salaries weren't as high, and hardware progress was extremely fast, so the computers had to be replaced every two or three years to remain practical, not just cool.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... "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.

The name rhymes with "frighten".

Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/crich...

Also a Source: Name is Scottish origin, I live in Scotland.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#123
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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...

Err, no. SGIs were first very expensive (3D) graphics workstations and later mostly also-rans in some other markets like storage and general-purpose big servers.

Servers were Sun, x86, HP-PA, IBM R6000 RISC (and probably some more UNIX / RISC systems). Workstations were PC, Sun, Apple (mostly for graphics / design), some NeXT.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#124

Earlier 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.

SGI machines mostly cost a lot of money for the 3D graphics hardware. They didn't make much sense for other purposes.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#126
fabiensanglard - thanks for all the wonderful posts about.. everything! While I started reading your blog when it was more focused on old games and C development, I still check it from time to time. I'm always blown away by the level of details you manage to dig up and present - no matter the subject.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#128

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?

They were offered one mass-market opportunity on a silver platter, which they took: When Nintendo asked them to design the N64 GPU. It didn't seem to be very profitable for them.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#129
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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:)

Then you're going to love learning that Feynman worked on them, specifically the inter-processor routing. https://longnow.org/ideas/richard-feynman-and-the-connection...

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Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Sometimes we didn’t even have ones, I wrote a whole database once using only zeros. - dilbert
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