A single mp3 would be more than the entire memory, let that sink in :)
But of course real hackers chiseled their own 0s and 1s out of rock by hand.
(unfortunately I have lost the PCMCIA sound card required to do this)
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.
So you would be surprised but also, it meant there were a lot of grey beards keeping the whole thing running.
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.
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..)
I have a Challenge S right now, and when I got it the drive had web hosting setup for a car dealer.
Starts here:
https://therealmccrea.com/2014/01/09/january-1994-a-very-goo...
So it was really interesting to read the stories from the SGI side of things, straight from the source. We pushed those machines into places they didn't really belong (US Huntington Beach Womens Volleyball tournaments .. so much sand ..) and did things we shouldn't really be doing (Hi, Aleph One!), but .. so much fun.
I'll boot up my Octane2 for the memories this weekend, maybe I can still find some of the old sites we made with that clunky WebFORCE software ..
You could always repurpose the SGI machine for anything else too.
Instead they did a deal with the devil and died.
I got a tiBook to use as a terminal for my SGI boxes at the time, and well now, 20 years later, a table full of Apple gear and the Octane2’s in storage, probably to be dusted off by a descendent some day .. it is sort of extraordinary that Apple ate SGI’s lunch in the Unix workstation department.
Those ‘cheaper dump Unix terminals’ with Ethernet you might be remembering were not so dumb, but rather smart - i.e. had Ethernet and addressable graphics, and an onboard X server .. i.e. dumb X terminals.
When Mac got X, or at least Ethernet (and thus sockets), it was a pretty comfortable way to term to the Unix box, since the Mac wasn’t dumb, and could do plenty and plenty of other things ..
TCP/IPover serial lines is a thing!
But I wasn't quite alive yet in 1991 (let alone administering IT deployments for biolabs and theme parks colocated on remote tropical islands), so what do I know lmao
SGI and Apple computers didn't provide the most bang for the buck, or even the most bang, but they sure did use up the most bucks. Other than high prices, and the target market that goes with it, they couldn't have been more different.
The SGI systems were 3D rendering beasts, with a significant portion of their hardware dedicated to the task, making them fast machines for any task, because of the underlying capabilities needed to support that 3D hardware, and they were stable because of the robust Unix operating system. The Apple computers ran on commodity 68040 and an OS that couldn't preempt the software running on it, so a crashed application would take down the whole system.
A stock Amigo computer, at half the price of the Apple system, was just as capable, but supported better upgrades for live video processing. An IBM PS/2 computer running OS/2 would have had the stability of a Unix system, on lower-priced commodity hardware.
If they needed the 3D capabilities of the SGI systems, that was the only option, but if they otherwise only wanted to mess around with video, Amiga computers would have been better than the Apple ones, at a lower price. If they needed something robust, where a user process couldn't crash the system, other Unix workstations would have worked just as well, at a lower price, and an OS/2 workstation would have also worked, at a much, much lower price. Also, there's a rational to having a video-capable Amiga computer along with a robust network-focused Unix or OS/2 workstation, but if you already have an SGI workstation at your desk, you wouldn't really need another computer.
The computers make more sense for someone making movies than someone running an elaborate zoo, but considering how often characters in Michael Crichton's books are authors themselves, it makes sense that characters in his movies to have an affinity toward making movies, and buying the computers that would be used to do so.
Also I was never a big Amiga guy so I'm not sure, did they have an equivalent to QuickTime and Cinepak in 1992 to play video clips? Microsoft hadn't released Video for Windows yet.
No, it supported very high res screens too, but it required special screens such as the A2024 (15" 1024x1024!) Later on there were also RTG graphics cards available.
> Did they have an equivalent to QuickTime and Cinepak in 1992 to play video clips?
The Amiga's graphics were ahead of its time, but the tradeoffs they chose proved very unsuitable for video playback applications (specifically the planar nature.) There eventually did exist video playback tools, but they either assumed the presence of an RTG card, or post-dated the death of the Amiga by several decades.
I looked up the A2024
The monitor is quite unique in that it contains an internal framebuffer which is controlled via the RGBI lines of the video port [...] The monitor manages to achieve the high resolutions by effectively buffering four Amiga screens, whereby each screen displays a portion of the overall picture. Because of this, the "effective" refresh rate decreases to around 10-15Hz (software configurable). [...] It seems that the monitor by be able to individually refresh the separate quadrants of the screen, as the quadrant which contains the mouse cursor appears to be updated more frequently
What an amazing hack! Reminds me of the lengths people went to add larger external displays to the early 9" Macs using SCSI graphics cards that basically re-implemented QuickDraw
Also, Nedry got absolutely shafted by Hammond in the book. Nedry describing the difficultly in building a complex system with minimal requirements had me sympathizing, lol.
> These are highly complicated pieces of equipment. Almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases, they have been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work.
https://archive.org/details/herbert-barnard-1980-without-me-...
Even by the time of the film regular consumer hardware had reached parity. Now we use more power to run to do list apps
The Crays used in the fictional Jurassic Park (Y-MP’s?) would have been much more powerful still.
The Cray machines were incredible feats of design and engineering.
Do you know if I can find a better source than that to confirm?
https://hardware.majix.org/computers/sgi/keyboards.shtml https://hardware.majix.org/computers/sgi.pi/keyboard.shtml
And the keyboard(7) man page actually has full details on the protocol (Indigo uses the mini DIN-6): https://github.com/jtsiomb/sgikbd/blob/master/doc/sgi_man7_k...
Back in the days when it was an MS-DOS world…
"It's a DOS system... I need to edit the config.sys because the mouse driver has taken up too much base memory and I need to configure EMM386."
"Oh great! Is this HDD Master or Slave? Where are my tweezers, I need to swap the jumper!"
3DFX and Nvidia ultimately put them out of business.
AFAICT, SGI was a textbook Innovator’s Dilemma case with an expensive enterprise product that’s hard to give up in the face of cheap, low-margin competition.
I remember at the time seeing some folks blown away that they could do SGI like stuff on a PC with a $199 add on card. It wasn't identical but it was close enough and you didn't have to switch to out of the Windows ecosystem. That kind of scaling and software inertia is just too hard to compete against.
What stopped SGI from offering such $199 add-on cards, but with their name on it?
They built an incredible Windows NT system (for the time) but couldn’t keep up with the 6 month release cycle their competitors were on.
SGI was an incredible place to work while it lasted.
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
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.
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.
"The search engine found the answer too" is not an interesting response.
rip
> 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 well as it has if more CGI (or other ways of "faking" things) had been been used.
As for the question (in <references[9]>):
> Some code associated with Nedryland is visible on screen. It looks like actual source code[9] with Classic Mac OS API functions calls.
That looks like old Pascal, and since the window has MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop) in the title, that's probably it?
It's funny they say this back in 1993. It feels like we've gone from computers being a niche but beloved piece of tech to a ubiquitous and reviled piece of tech.
What's great is he self-identified as a hacker.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n2/26_Michael_Cri...
> Although he does not consider himself an expert programmer or serious hacker, Crichton is in favor of hacking and the people who do it. He explains: "It's perfectly OK for a movie director to eat and sleep movies and to have no other interest in life--that's Stephen Spielberg. He's applauded for it; he's lionized. It's fine for a symphony conductor to have no other interest than music, or for a painter to live to paint. So why isn't it OK for a person who loves computers to be totally wrapped up in computers?
"I think the answer is that it is OK. I like hacking. I think the most boring thing in the world is to sit down with a bunch of flowcharts and think everything out before you start programming."
Do you mean Michael Crichton, the author of the original book?
Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/crich...
Also a Source: Name is Scottish origin, I live in Scotland.
https://youtu.be/34r8Ypxzkk4 (28:42-28:54)
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.
The source code shown is example code included with the Macintosh Programmers Workshop, Apple's original IDE for the Mac. Originally sold as a separate product, eventually it was provided on the Developer CDs and then as a free online download as serious developers had moved to CodeWarrior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer's_Worksho...
One of the windows shows the example for how to make a HyperCard XCMD and the other one looks like an MPW script for using Apple's Projector source control.
edit: Found the files in question in a copy of MPW 3.1. Line endings have been converted from CR to LF and the character set from MacOS Roman to UTF-8 to display easily in modern browsers
MPW 3.1:Examples:HyperXExamples:Reduce.p https://kalleboo.com/linked/Reduce.p.txt
MPW 3.1:Examples:Examples:CheckOutActive https://kalleboo.com/linked/CheckOutActive.txt
MPW 3.1:Examples:Examples:DerezPict https://kalleboo.com/linked/DerezPict.txt
https://grapheine.com/en/magazine/the-story-of-the-big-bad-j...
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 the other designers had the engineers move to be at the edge of the boards, so that they'd shine through the case. Super cool.
But by the CM-5, they were run off a simple microcontroller.
They went bust not long after this movie.
I made a YouTube video on the history of the Connection Machine – it was a lot of work, and if you're interested in this sort of thing I think you'll enjoy it:
https://longnow.org/ideas/richard-feynman-and-the-connection...
Yes to it is unix Wow for the sync What !!! For this
Have to stop reading to avoid brain go crazy
Thinking Machines also pioneered WAIS which was a precursor to modern search engines.
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.)
But that's such a great find – I've seen T2 many times, but that visual of the black hypercube-looking design really is strikingly similar!
Starring the Computer
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48796093
and the Jurassic Park (1993) page there: https://www.starringthecomputer.com/feature.php?f=11
What an oddly specific Easter egg.
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 tasked Sony with designing the PowerBook 100 by taking the Macintosh Portable and slimming it down as much as possible. They shaved over 10lbs by moving away from the lead acid battery, dropping the floppy drive, and moving to a passive matrix display.
You can download the original CDE here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Reading from the activity, it still seems to receive some fixes and updates although, as the SlackBuild author said, it would not be advisable to use it in an internet-facing desktop for security reasons.
NsCDE also behaves very well.
Otherwise, you can use Xfce which was heavily inspired by CDE; and now, even Plasma 6 have a very good CDE-like (or Motif) theme.
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.
Quite a fun little tool to visualise your storage.
From 1:09:50 – 1:10:13, we join Arnold as he describes Nedry's methods to Sadler, Hammond and Muldoon.
At 1:10:00, Ray Arnold mentions the whte_rbt.obj — whatever it did, it did it all.
Later monitor technologies like LCDs don’t have this issue because they don’t have the same moving electron beam illuminating each line of pixels, and it also became cheaper to just replace all the computer screens with CG, so eventually this specialized technical work wasn’t needed anymore, and my uncle ended up doing other things on the movies he worked on.
It's conceptually easy, but I'm sure there's lots of technical issues. Some devices might need slightly earlier or later timing of their pulse. Many devices don't accept a genlock input from the factory, and might need to be modified or substitited. In this case, all the video screens were controlled from outside the room, so they would have picked genlockable devices.
There's a lot of details around the time the shutter is open and the time the image takes to draw... You would need to do a lot of test shots to find what works best.
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 Private Relay is "off". Very unusual, will have to do some more digging assuming this is just affecting me and not others in Safari on latest macOS beta.
Update works in latest Safari Tech Preview, so assuming some cache/cookie/etc issue even though again affects Private mode.
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'
The site has typography analysis from several other scifi films too.
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).
But if we take it at face value, immersed in the cinematic world they are building. Some young wanna be hacker, knows a little more than the average joe about computers. and when all the adults in the room are afraid to even look at the system, steps up to see what it is about. We have all been there. And stumbles on this 3d thing(perhaps needry enjoyed the demo and left a link on the desktop) but the names are familiar, it is the same as the sun system at the university you can telnet into. "Hey this is unix, I know this! now where would the the start park script be?"
Basically me "Hey my mac is not working right, you like computers can you fix it?" starts sweating, having never touched a mac in my life "S.S.Sure" Click around a bit find the terminal "Hey this is unix, I know this!"
As an aside I bought an sgi in the early 2000s ($300 for a $30000 doller computer, what a steal), I suspect largely due to Michael Crichton books and was tickled pink to find out the "This is unix, I know this!" One of the stupider in a long list of stupid hollywood interfaces was actually a real thing.
I need to find out what the matrix used, it smells like motif on the worst passive matrix(wait a minute) lcd screen you have ever seen in your life.
I have a hard time watching almost any "hacking" scene. I know I should just suspend my disbelief and enjoy the movie for what it is. But anything with computers just hits too close to my professional knowledge and I start to get agitated. I suspect it is probably the same for most professional fields. Me: Yep they are pouring concrete alright. The guy two seats down: What the F is that; you can't pour like that the whole batch would be ruined and look at that criminally negligent framing and rebar work. ugg. this movie is terrible.
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 reactions from the audience that night were when the CM-5 was shown for the first time and then when the young actress says, "It's a Unix system. I know this"
As a kid JP was a favorite of mine, and eventually I got into Linux as an older teen.
That sequence cemented Unix as this mythical thing in my mind and I knew I had to know more. I eventually got to work on AIX in my first sysadmin role which was great. I leaned more into Linux, but it had a positive effect on my IT career.
Are they columns in the building load-bearing? You know, the ones with giant chunks chipped out to be more aesthetic and look like fossil digging work.
Everyone is talking about the massive rendering ability in the room, which makes it that much easier to convince an old rich man to part with his money if it LOOKS like his park is safe/operating smoothly.
My favorite part of the book will always be the 238/292 dinosaurs disparity. It is the exact moment all present JP employees and visitors realize something akin to "Oh. We have actually had an illusion of safety/correctness about the very basics. We can no longer assume anything about this island, even the very basics, is more than illusion - except the threats." At no point after stepping on this island is anyone not in danger.
This and the scene where they realize they've been running on backup power the whole time are both fantastic
Especially awesome if film-makers started DONATING their video assets to the museum.