Minor typo fix "SuperMach" > "SuperMatch
Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
221–230 of 278 posts
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#222It was indeed a Thinking Machines CM-5 — Nedry actually mentioned them in his line about how Hammond wouldn't be able to find anyone "anybody who can network 8 connection machines". An actual assembled CM-5 actually cost closer to a million dollars. But, from what I remember the one in the control room is a shell. In the CM-1 and CM-2, the LEDs were actual status indicators on the processors, which Tamiko Theil and t…
Do you think it's coincidence the chip for Skynet looks so much like the Connection Machine?
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#223> This machine specs reminds me of how awful '90s laptop screens, based on a passive matrix, were. Definitely something I don't miss from that era. While the 1991 Apple PowerBook 100 did have a passive matrix display, the machine it was based on, the Macintosh Portable from 1989, had a crisp active matrix running at 640×400 (even higher resolution than the compact Macintosh desktops with 512×342). Interestingly Apple…
My family owned a Mac Portable (the backlit model). Running Word for Mac 5.1, it was a fantastic writing machine.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#224My 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…
If anyone is curious about 24fps CRT displays on set, I loved this [2 hour] video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qicQUvSUbPM
I absolutely knew who made this video before clicking on the link too
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#225Earlier 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...
What a gem of an article. I don't know physics, I use computer for my work and nothing beyond, but reading about the mindset of an actual scientist is really interesting.
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#226> 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 :)
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#227In Safari (macOS Beta), none of the pictures load. In dev tools shows 403 error for all. If view the image urls directly shows "It appears you don't have permission to access this page. 403 Error. Forbidden." in a stylized font. Content blockers are "not" enabled. Able to replicate in Private window too. In Chrome however, images all load normally, also able to view the image urls directly. Very odd. No VPN and Priva…
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Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#228It feels like 1990s movies were the heaviest on computers/gadgets. Jurassic Park has a programmer as a main character, GoldenEye has two.
Oh, guess Jurassic Park has two programmer main characters if you count the one who knows Unix
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#229In Safari (macOS Beta), none of the pictures load. In dev tools shows 403 error for all. If view the image urls directly shows "It appears you don't have permission to access this page. 403 Error. Forbidden." in a stylized font. Content blockers are "not" enabled. Able to replicate in Private window too. In Chrome however, images all load normally, also able to view the image urls directly. Very odd. No VPN and Priva…
I ran into the same problem with Firefox, except viewing it directly works.
It turns out the server is using referer checking and I've got referer disabled. Compare the following curl invocations:
curl 'https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/00_11_15_Apple_Powerbook_100.webp' \
-H 'Referer: https://fabiensanglard.net/'
curl 'https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/00_11_15_Apple_Powerbook_100.webp'
Re: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
#230What 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
What about Jurassic Park 2? Never saw it