Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
fabiensanglard.net931 points by vinhnx 2 days ago
931 points by vinhnx 2 days ago
> It is unclear how Jurassic Park crew got their hands on a Motorola Envoy
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
IMO this is the social internet at its best. Pretty obscure question answered relatively quickly with answer and source.
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.
Of course, the only reason AI knows about it is because one human posted it online because they wanted to share a good story with another human
I really worry about AI leading to the information death of the internet. If everyone is getting their info from AI, rather than actually reading websites/blogs/forums, is there any incentive for posting things like this on the internet in the first place?
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.
In the early days of the smart phone, I had heard it referred to as the Bar Bet Settler 5000. It was pulled out of one's pocket and with its web browser one would use Google's search page to find information to settle the bet. Then, those smart phones got infected with social media apps and the Bar Bet Settler 5000 went the way of the dodo.
As more people offload their search/mental effort to LLM’s and fewer people take the time to answer these obscure questions, unfortunately we will simply lose the fun portion while making LLM’s incapable of answering them. So good news is you don’t have to make a decision!
> Some code associated with Nedryland is visible on screen. It looks like actual source code[9] with Classic Mac OS API functions calls
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
My 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 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.
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
How was the syncing actually achieved?
You want to look into genlock[1]. Tldr, everything that needs to be synchronized (at least your video outputs and your camera; possibly lights and audio recording) needs to accept a clock input from a centralized clock to signal the start of vblank. Maybe one device can generate it, and the others follow.
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.
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 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"
“It’s a Unix system. I know this.” was definitely the line from the movie most quoted in online spaces in the 90s.
I wonder how many sysadmin or adjacent careers that scene helped to foster.
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.
That’s amazing! I live next to their former office. Do you know which theater they rented out?
It 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 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:
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...
It’s a real classic. An amazing article super worth reading (and re-reading if it’s been a while) and almost infinitely quotable.
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.
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.
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.)
Also, the indoor park "tour" voiceover refers to "Thinking Machine supercomputers", which I never figured were a brand name until today!
It’s so lame they changed the LEDs to meaning nothing.
On the upside, this means you can run the LED boards without the rest of the CM-5. Have one panel that still works.
I'd love to be able to add 1U or 2U of blinkenlights to my rack, even if the pattern was completely random.
Do you think it's coincidence the chip for Skynet looks so much like the Connection Machine?
Probably not! I'd imagine that whoever did production design for the movie would have visited some of the labs of the time, or talked to people involved in AI – and the CM-1 / CM-2 were very much at the forefront of that type of computing back then.
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!
The funniest part about this thing is that it seems to have had roughly the same performance of a modern day CM5 (the Raspberry kind).
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 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?
What a respectful view of the audience. Too bad this approach was replicated what feels like approximately 0 times after it.
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 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."
> ... "Creighton" ...
Do you mean Michael Crichton, the author of the original book?
Surely. The name is pronounced like Creighton.
The name rhymes with "frighten".
Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/crich...
Also a Source: Name is Scottish origin, I live in Scotland.
Also a source: back in the '90s, I once resolved a disagreement with a friend over the pronunciation of the man's name by emailing him to ask, and "Crichton rhymes with 'frighten'" was his exact answer.
I mixed up German and English pronunciation of "ei". The German one sounds like English "i", so it would be Crighton.
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
"audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers"
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
I re-read the book recently and it was really fun to read about the tech now. The descriptions of how difficult it was to build a database that could handle storing 3bil base pairs, which is trivia now. Probably the most sci-fi part of the book, they had image recognition tech so advanced it could track individual dinosaurs from arbitrary video angles alone.
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.
Crichton was frighteningly good as a prognosticator and futurist. Certainly for a writer with a medical degree. He fought the good fight, trying to inculcate caution. Most of his books (even from the seventies) hold up surprisingly well until the early 2000s. They got a bit weird by 2006. But then so did our ideas of future tech.
He even wrote a non fictional book on Personal Computers back in 1983 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Life
All the cool kids were writing those.
https://archive.org/details/herbert-barnard-1980-without-me-...
On the other hand he also did a ‘climate change is fake’ book (state of fear).
Gell-Mann Amnesia? Interestingly enough, the term was coined by Crichton.
It was kind of scary how prescient Jurassic Park was. Just swap genetics for AI and his warnings are incredibly applicable to modern times.
Much like his earlier work Westworld which was also scarily prescient for modern times.
> 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.
That’s an amazing connection, had no idea they were written by the same person but the underlying theme is pretty consistent.
I still remember one of the characters in the book being awestruck by the number of Cray supercomputers the park had, and certain this must mean they were doing something really, really significant
Even by the time of the film regular consumer hardware had reached parity. Now we use more power to run to do list apps
I feel like I'm picking up on more intentional or if not, lore-compatible, examples of John Hammond's "spare no expense" going towards as much the illusion of control as any actual innovations/control.
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.
Spielberg masterfully turned the 238/292 into the visual/explanation of the egg. I don't remember if the book has the "why" so much as the "at what scale" of the reality. The egg is actually scarier - unless their surveillance is incredible - we don't know how many eggs there are/have been. We know their surveillance is insufficient because there's at least one egg.
> 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 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.
We just watched this movie last night (as a tribute to Sam Neill). I loved all the SGI hardware. Although the Irix FSN file explorer scene made me cring. It was excurciating watching Lex navigate. On that era of hardware, midnight commander would have been my jam. (or honestly `ls` just like it is now). I did love seeing Dennis pounding on that Apple ADB keyboard (even though there was no way that'd be hooked to an SGI Indy unless he did serious work). Just for giggles, I hit up eBay to see what a Quadra 700 was going for. Wait, WHAT??? 1500 - 2500 USD??? For an antique that will do nothing all that useful? Wow. Wish I still had my Macintosh SE that I could sell to put my kid through college....
So... Realistically fsn makes for a killer visual for audiences, "this computer is SOOO advanced it has a 3d interface" and here is someone doing something technical with it.
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.
Matrix 2 had Trinity using a well known nmap hack at the command line! I like that attention to detail.
I saw it in the theaters and very nearly cheered when I saw someone actually using a command line and nmap in a hollywood film.
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.
I work as a film prop master so this is fun to read and imagine my work being celebrated 30 years down the line. The art department will often lean heavily on me for tech-related set pieces because I have a CS degree. This article is a testament to the fantastic work of production designer Rick Carter, set decorator Jackie Carr, and prop master Jerry Moss.
How am I only now seeing that Nedry's SGI monitor had a picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer on it with a scrawled message, "Beginning of Baby Boom"?
What an oddly specific Easter egg.
The control room in Jurassic Park was honestly beautiful - and something about those shaving cream cans really crystallized the aesthetic for me, weirdly. I had no idea that it was taken so seriously, I just remember thinking "damn, that's actually pretty realistic" when I re-watched the movie a few years ago.
Also, SGI keyboards never used ADB. Indigo-era SGIs used a mini-DIN keyboard/mouse, but it was proprietary. They were PS/2 starting with the Indigo2 and Indy.
Thank you, I double checked in the SGI hardware developer handbook and it looks like you were correct.
Do you know if I can find a better source than that to confirm?
These links show the pinout:
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...
A clone of fsn, fsv (File System Visualizer) is available and works on modern Linux.
Quite a fun little tool to visualise your storage.
I was five years old when I saw this movie and it blew my mind and now work in tech and read Hacker News for deepest of the deep dives into nonsense like this. So yeah, I devoured this entire article. Thanks!
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?
It 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
"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).
> 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.
Depending on tha game you could easily hit 70 gigs on a game today, some over 100. Usually high graphic AAA games. Less HD texture games can still be quite small though.
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.
It had a Motorola 68000 processor at 16 MHz, 2–8 megabytes (MB) of RAM, a 9-inch (23 cm) monochrome backlit liquid-crystal display (LCD) with 640 × 400 pixel resolution, and the System 7.0.1 operating system.
A single mp3 would be more than the entire memory, let that sink in :)
The memory requirement is actually not a problem, because you may be able to stream the mp3 from a harddisk ( easily 159 KB per second from a 2.5 inch ide disk when used on a 7mhz 68000 of amiga 600) or maybe even from a floppy ( 10 KB per second on a double density floppy ).
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.
You'll find plenty of people on HN who grew up with Commodore 64s, thus named for having 64 kilobytes of memory, the approximate size of a website favicon in 2026.
But of course real hackers chiseled their own 0s and 1s out of rock by hand.
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
god forbid if you got a parahydrogen vs a orthohydrogen hydrogen. That reverse spin really messed up the 1's.
I had a TI-99/4a. 16KB of memory. Expandable with the purchase of an expensive "Peripheral Expansion System" and 32KB card. Or 4KB "mini-memory" cartridge.
I own a Toshiba Libretto 30. This has a 486 DX4 100 MHz processor. Back at the dawn of MP3s, it could play them .. but only if you used the optimized Fraunhofer decoder, WinAmp would struggle and break up. It didn't quite have the MIPS.
(unfortunately I have lost the PCMCIA sound card required to do this)
I remember I have my first computer that could actually play MP3's. The computer I had before it could store them but not play them. So yeah I remember those times...
I have found memories of my PowerBook 100. It was my first computer and everything was just magic back then. Made games and utilities with HyperCard back then. MOved to a LC630 afterward and that so so fast in comparison. I could finally play Marathon without waiting my turn in the LAN parties :D
Some of us don’t have to - we lived it. My first personal computer had an 8-bit processor and 8KB of RAM (that I later upgraded to 32KB and color graphics) and its storage was about 8KB on cassette.
Biggest lesson of Jurassic Park: Don't hire only one sysadmin
If people like this post, they will probably like the below post about the typography used in the movie Alien.
The site has typography analysis from several other scifi films too.
Generally full marks on realism, but I have to ask: Is a combination of SGI and old school macs a sensible platform for running a park? I guess if the macs can get on an appropriate network then they could at least send control commands, but they feel like an odd fit compared to the UNIX™ boxes.
Canonically, John Hammond spared no expense.
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.
And the out-of-universe explanation is that the Jurassic Park production team had access to SGI "3D rendering beasts" because they needed to render some CGI dinosaurs. So these are both what they had to hand, and what the producers associated with powerful computers.
Interesting though in retrospect they chose good platforms, Mac and UNIX are still around and flourishing and OS/2 died a death, although would a lot of OS/2 stuff have run on Windows?
Wasn't the Amiga essentially limited to interlaced video? That basically relegated it to a machine for games or realtime NTSC/PAL video effects.
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.
> Wasn't the Amiga essentially limited to interlaced video?
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.
Thanks for the reply!
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
Hammond spared no expense except when it came to Nedry, which was a critical mistake.
Movie-Nedry struck me as a certain kind of hacker trope (but whom I've also met in real life!) where part of their "compensation" is access to unusual and high end computer hardware. It's irrelevant whether it's the best tool for the job (and as the page notes, Nedry seems to use his fancy SGI system mostly to render 3D chess). But, at least in principle, it's relatively cheap payment to keep your programmers happy (though it didn't exactly work out in the movie).
I don't think that it makes much economic sense. That hardware was extremely expensive at the time, developer salaries weren't as high, and hardware progress was extremely fast, so the computers had to be replaced every two or three years to remain practical, not just cool.
I used to work in an IT department that I called 'The Onion'. That's because the further into the room you went the older the systems got. It was a mix of almost anything you could think of in the mid 90's thru to mid 2000's. The oldest machine was some SGI thing.
So you would be surprised but also, it meant there were a lot of grey beards keeping the whole thing running.
At my college there was a tiny tucked away lab that had these giant old dot matrix printers that were very very fast and noisy (they were under plexiglass covers). I don’t remember why I was in there or what I was doing but I must have sent a binary to them because they took off and were printing the winding characters. The admins banned me after that. Heh by junior year there were a handful of labs on campus that when I walked in the gray beards (probably grad students) just pointed at the door and I walked right back out.
The Macs won't old school at the time. They were high-end workstations for anyone who didn't need Unix and wanted a GUI that worked.
Right. I just mean that macs running pre-Darwin Mac OS seem an odd choice.
They’re an odd choice now. Back then they would have made sense as a UI to the Unix machines.
Not much because a click on a menu would almost halt the entire network by design. Cheaper dumb Unix terminals were a thing where you jut used telnet and X forwarding.
“Just used Telnet” and “cheaper dumb Unix terminals” .. hmm .. not to be bold or anything, but I’ve been using Unix since the folding paper terminal days .. and as I remember it personally, it kinda went like this: paper-terminal connected to modem (telephone suction cup model) .. hazeltine serial terminal and either 2 long RS232 cables strung to the ops room if you were local, or a HAYES modem or two .. but still only a tty, no addressable graphics - these kinds of ‘cheap’ terminal accessories were kind of the thing for most of the early 80’s, then around mid to late 80’s, PC’s got Ethernet, C:\TERM\TERM.COM, etc..
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 ..
You can forward X windows over slip/plip or ppp running on rs232.
TCP/IPover serial lines is a thing!
The early web was born on the back of Mac's connecting to SGI machines...
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..)