I still want the Gibson towers from the movie Hackers https://i0.wp.com/scifiinterfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
You could probably make something like that with plexiglass
Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
51–60 of 80 posts
Re: Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The movie itself predates the moon landing - it came out in 1968. It's astonishing to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey today and reflect on how well the production design has aged. That movie is coming up on 60 years old now! The portrayal of AI has held up extraordinarily well too.
>The portrayal of AI has held up extraordinarily well too. it's interesting to think that many of our current AIs were trained on our fiction in a weird self-fulfilling strange loop. of course the portrayal aged well, the damn things are using the material as a mimicry source.
Just don’t feed it the terminator movies, or the matrix.
Re: Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
#53Wayne Knight aka Newman was - as far as I can tell - the most successful regular cast member from Seinfeld with respect to a movie career outside of that show.
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Re: Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
#54Re: Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
#55Normally you don't want to read the comments, but if you're curious about the topic please make an exception here.
No kidding! The people directly involved give plenty of background info about it. That was an interesting read.
Re: Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
#56I love stuff like this. Often films and TV shows have anachronisms in them (like the very first episode, IIRC, of Narcos with the clearly very modern touchscreen photocopier where the screen has been covered with a piece of paper, or the BMW that wasn't released until the mid/late 1990s), but every so often you'll see something that is instead a flash of the future. Due to #reasons I watched the sentry gun scene in A…
GRiD Compass was the first portable computer in the now ubiquitous clamshell format, and it was launched in April 1982, several years before "Aliens". It was used in several high-profile applications, like in the NASA Space Shuttle and in some special operations of the US military. Therefore its use in the movie does not have any fantastic element in it. They have patented the clamshell form, so all the early laptop…
> Therefore its use in the movie does not have any fantastic element in it.
That's very subjective.
I simply didn't know any of this before I saw that clip and was surprised to see a couple of recognisably modern form factor laptops. It sounds like there may have been several models of GRiD Compass but, as of a few days ago, I'd never heard of any of them.
The early to mid 80s was still very much also the era of the luggable, but in 1986 I'd never seen either a luggable or a laptop, and whilst 10 year old me probably wouldn't have been super-impressed with a heavy computer in a suitcase, I probably would have been agog at a laptop. I don't think I even knew what a laptop was until maybe the early 90s when they started to become a bit more commonplace.
Re: Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
#57> It's the design mock up from the final presentation to Motorola for the iRadio (name later changed to Envoy). > The head of frogdesign, Hartmut Esslinger met Spielberg on a plane and showed him this mockup. Steven asked if it could be used as a prop in the film, and Hartmut gave it to him.
ok so it now begs the question... whos plane was this?
Re: Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
#58In Arthur C Clarke’s 2001 a space odyssey, in the book, he describes a flat handheld device that is used for reading the New York Times. He can’t remember the exact details but the ergonomics he describes perfectly encapsulate the tablet devices we have today. I’m pretty certain he wrote it before the 1969 moon landing.
The tablets that bridge officers were signing reports on from Star Trek TOS, which started airing in 1966, precedes that. They were boxier but clearly electronic.
I'd be curious if someone has tracked down the first of each modern thing
Dick Tracy (1933) had a smart watch - personal communicator
Bell Labs (1938) had video calls (facetime)
The Foundation (1951) had info tablets
No idea if they are the first of each
Re: Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
GRiD Compass was the first portable computer in the now ubiquitous clamshell format, and it was launched in April 1982, several years before "Aliens". It was used in several high-profile applications, like in the NASA Space Shuttle and in some special operations of the US military. Therefore its use in the movie does not have any fantastic element in it. They have patented the clamshell form, so all the early laptop…
> Therefore its use in the movie does not have any fantastic element in it. That's very subjective. I simply didn't know any of this before I saw that clip and was surprised to see a couple of recognisably modern form factor laptops. It sounds like there may have been several models of GRiD Compass but, as of a few days ago, I'd never heard of any of them. The early to mid 80s was still very much also the era of the…
When GRiD Compass was launched, I was in high school and I used to read regularly in a public library a magazine named "Electronics", which had been very important between 1930 and 1995 and where many significant news in the electronics and computing industries were announced first.
The launch of GRiD Compass started with a campaign of advertising in that magazine, which had very spectacular photos of the computer demonstrating various applications, especially due to its unusual flat electroluminescent display with a nice bright orange color.
Even if I usually am immune to advertising, I was very impressed by the GRiD Compass advertisements, so I have been remembering them until today, despite never seeing one in real life.
While GRiD Compass made me aware since the beginning of the existence of the laptop format (the word "laptop" has been coined one year after the launch of GRiD Compass by another company, Gavilan, which has introduced a computer copying the clamshell form, but made at a lower price, with a proportionally lower quality), I also had the opportunity of using laptops only many years later, starting in the year 2000.
Re: Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poor SGI. I used to love their website back in the 90s. It's strange to think that alternative architectures were possible though and could get such a foothold in some industries. The specificity is mind-blowng. Everything is "PC"s today.
Huh, I had no idea sgi was not pc hardware. I just assumed they made PCs with their own OS
Back then there were quite a few competing architectures and UNIXes to go with them. SGI MIPS with Irix, IBM had POWER with AIX and later Linux, DEC had Alpha Tru64 UNIX and VMS (not a UNIX), Sun SPARC with Solaris, HP had HA-RISC with HP-UX. Only SPARC and POWER survived for long and only POWER survived until today as far as I know. Solaris of course lives on in various forms. The old UNIXes I guess mostly do not, being displaced almost entirely by Linux and BSDs.