Live data from Hacker News

Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

fabiensanglard.net

131–140 of 278 posts

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#131

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!

god forbid if you got a parahydrogen vs a orthohydrogen hydrogen. That reverse spin really messed up the 1's.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#133
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 :)

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...

[deleted]

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#134

Earlier 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.

I mixed up German and English pronunciation of "ei". The German one sounds like English "i", so it would be Crighton.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#135
post #62
post #42

Earlier 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...

It’s a real classic. An amazing article super worth reading (and re-reading if it’s been a while) and almost infinitely quotable.

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

IMO this is the social internet at its best. Pretty obscure question answered relatively quickly with answer and source.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#137

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.

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.

At my college there was a tiny tucked away lab that had these giant old dot matrix printers that were very very fast and noisy (they were under plexiglass covers). I don’t remember why I was in there or what I was doing but I must have sent a binary to them because they took off and were printing the winding characters. The admins banned me after that. Heh by junior year there were a handful of labs on campus that when I walked in the gray beards (probably grad students) just pointed at the door and I walked right back out.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#139

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…

How was the syncing actually achieved?

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#140
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 :)

The memory requirement is actually not a problem, because you may be able to stream the mp3 from a harddisk ( easily 159 KB per second from a 2.5 inch ide disk when used on a 7mhz 68000 of amiga 600) or maybe even from a floppy ( 10 KB per second on a double density floppy ).

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.

Post reply on HN