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Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

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Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#182
post #174

My wife worked for Thinking Machines back then. I remember that they'd asked Cray to loan them a supercomputer for the film because that's the computer used in the book. Cray brushed them off, so they turned to Thinking Machines who were happy to do it. To thank them, the producers rented a theater in Cambridge, MA to screen the film just for Thinking Machines and I was also able to attend. By far the biggest reactio…

The line at my workplace was "It's a Unix system... WE'RE SCREWED!"

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI immediately gives me the same answer. I can’t tell if I like this easy access to detail or lament the growing irrelevance of “social internet” for these kinds of things. It reminds me of pre-phone disagreements among pals. You’d argue and argue and maybe eventually agree to disagree. Today someone just looks up the trivia and it’s all over.

I don't know if I'm unique in this, but I find myself asking people I know about things that I know I can easily lookup faster. At this point it's more a social ritual than actual information gathering.

same here, but only when it feels like good conversation or is a subject we already discuss. Especially if youre in the same room, then it can become a little trivia game and if no one knows then someone can look it up

related note, my girlfriend is bilingual with spanish, and i only have some old high school classes of spanish to go off of, so whenever she texts me a word i dont recognize i ask her what it means. Aside from helping me understand, she gets a peek into my literacy level (which is admittedly pretty low), i can call out the word when its used again, and i get the impression she likes teaching me these little things.

extending the lesson beyond our little ritual, when you ask another person for the information it goes beyond being useful to each other. it is a bid for connection, and a display that you trust them and their opinion/knowledge on the subject.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#184
post #168

"There is a continuity error in the movie. See how the stack of PLI is facing left in this early shot." It occurs to me that Arnold would be likely to turn these to face him when sitting at Nedry's desk (unless we see a shot of him going to sit and they already face forward). It'd obviously be part of the review of undoing Nedry's lockout to see if the backups are working (if I understand the point of the machines).

Or since the equipment was on loan, the marketers requested hero shots of the equipment.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#185
post #51

When I watched Jurassic Park when it came out, I got so enamored with the computers in the movie, especially the SGI, that I adjusted the looks of our DOS GUI library[1] so it would look more like it. (I had already a liking to OSF/Motif then) [1] https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision

This looks really nice, I also have a weird love for this kinds of GUI's. Windows 95/98 & CDE are my thing, and I really miss it.

There's always NsCDE which should run on modern Linux. Haven't tried it myself.

https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#187
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Er, yes. Many media companies onboarded to the web in the early 90's using SGI machines. The Indy was a very popular multi-host system for such things. It was not a graphics powerhouse and in many low-end configurations its primary function was web serving. (Disclaimer: I helped build the early web using SGI systems, with many major media companies as clients..)

They even had the "WebFORCE" branding with the "to author and serve" tagline! I also did a lot of early web work on an Indy, and we hosted on a Challenge!

I have a Challenge S right now, and when I got it the drive had web hosting setup for a car dealer.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#190

What a great post! I would love to read more of these for other films. > Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers. > ... > - Cory Faucher (Special Effects Coordinator) This sentiment seems to run throughout the movie, and I believe it's why it's held up so well in terms of visuals, I don't think it would have aged nearly as…

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

Thanks for the link, and boy is that a whopper. Do my eyes deceive me or is there literally a shot of the computer looking at them from its computery perspective, through its screen, with some layer of visual digital artifacts over it at the 14 second mark?
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