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!
Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
131–140 of 278 posts
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#132Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#133It 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 remember I have my first computer that could actually play MP3's. The computer I had before it could store them but not play them. So yeah I remember those times...
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#136> 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
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#137Generally 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.
I used to work in an IT department that I called 'The Onion'. That's because the further into the room you went the older the systems got. It was a mix of almost anything you could think of in the mid 90's thru to mid 2000's. The oldest machine was some SGI thing. So you would be surprised but also, it meant there were a lot of grey beards keeping the whole thing running.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#138Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#139My 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…
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#140It 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 :)
The actual problem is that mp3 decoding requires lots of math, and the total cpu usage to decode at 22Khz mono is the equivalent of a 68030 running at 50mhz, which is more or less 5 times as much CPU as a 68000 running at 16mhz.