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Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

fabiensanglard.net

241–250 of 278 posts

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#241

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…

> Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers.

It’s funny he said that because when I first saw Jurassic park as a computer nerd kid, I was calling out the “this is UNIX, I know this” scene where she then flies around the file system in a 3d rendered file browser as typical movie computer BS.

Turns out it was a real application running on a real SGI machine, and ironically I was calling it out specifically because of my knowledge of computers (not having any idea about SGI machines at the time but having a ton of experience with DOS and Windows 3.1). My family who didn’t have much computer knowledge didn’t think anything of it.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#242
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Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great video. I visited Brewster Kahle at Thinking Machines back when I was in college and that visit ended up being one of the major influences in my career. The CM was way ahead of it's time. Thinking Machines also pioneered WAIS which was a precursor to modern search engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Information_Server

Thank you! My biggest regret in the video is I didn't get to touch on Brewster Kahle's involvement – especially given what he's gone on to do with Internet Archive. Would love to do a followup. Re: Search Engines, I think I mention this in the video but apparently Sergey Brin was part of the Connection Machine user community, and had that experience on his resume. (A copy of that is still floating around.)

I think Brewster is one of those photos in your video. I met him because I set up the first WAIS server in Australia and he was kind enough to offer a tour when I mentioned I was visiting Boston. Good times.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#244
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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...

Strange words in my head pop up 3 times

Yes to it is unix Wow for the sync What !!! For this

Have to stop reading to avoid brain go crazy

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#246

Hey Fabien! It doesn't look like the link for this article is on your main page. I love your posts and check the main page frequently each week; I totally missed it until I saw it here.

You have to force-refresh with Cmd + Shift + R. I don't know why Chrome caches it despite the .html being updated.

The http response headers from your server tells the browser to cache the page for 3 days. Either reduce this 3 days value or add ‘nocache’ in the Cache-Control header to tell the browser to validate the cache with a request every time the page is loaded.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

“You had zeros? We had to use the letter “O”…” -Wally

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#248

I think Fabien is misinterpreting the part which he sees as "video conferencing." Nedry is talking to a guy on a regular phone line. He's just watching a security camera feed from the dock where the guy is.

I am ambivalent about this. When I watch the sequence it looks like the guy in the harbor looks at the camera?

Nedry doesn't have a camera on his end, and he's talking through a headset. Maybe guy at the harbor just knows where the closed circuit camera is? Since it's just quicktime anyway, I guess we'll never know what they intended it to be unless someone asks the director.

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#249

Earlier 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…

An academy award for software?

Not just for software, but more generally for technology that influences the movie industry: https://www.oscars.org/sci-tech

Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

#250

> Since John Hammond "spared no expense", it is fair to say he picked 1GiB version at $3,598 a piece. That would give them 7 GiB of storage for a 2026 equivalent of $33,223.70. In 2026, 7 GiB of HDD would cost $0.49. Did anyone ever try to estimate storage inflation across time? 7GiB could be one or two pc games in 2026, in 1992 one games likely was 1.4MB.

7GB could very well be less than a game today. I've got only one commercial game on my Mac, MTW2 at 14GiB, and it's on the older side. But AssaultCube is 80MiB :)

Very much less than a AAA game at least. The other day I had a 10GB update for Apex Legends.
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