alt.hn

7/15/2026 at 2:57:47 AM

Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

 https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/index.html

by vinhnx

7/15/2026 at 4:07:04 AM

> 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

by kalleboo

7/15/2026 at 11:05:54 AM

IMO this is the social internet at its best. Pretty obscure question answered relatively quickly with answer and source.

by ronbenton

7/15/2026 at 11:56:01 AM

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.

by Waterluvian

7/15/2026 at 3:01:38 PM

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

by pimlottc

7/15/2026 at 12:41:45 PM

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.

by bdcravens

7/15/2026 at 2:20:48 PM

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.

by order-matters

7/15/2026 at 12:46:05 PM

It's just like we evolved to be social creatures!

by seedboot

7/15/2026 at 4:28:48 PM

> AI immediately gives me the same answer.

"The search engine found the answer too" is not an interesting response.

by MisterTea

7/15/2026 at 5:42:18 PM

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.

by dylan604

7/15/2026 at 1:30:09 PM

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!

by Forgeties79

7/15/2026 at 4:33:05 AM

Thanks, I am going to update the article!

by fabiensanglard

7/15/2026 at 8:22:54 AM

Life finds a way

by TurdF3rguson

7/15/2026 at 9:16:21 AM

Thank you! What a beautiful and appropriate meta comment!

by vishnugupta

7/15/2026 at 12:03:46 PM

>part of Capgemini Invent

rip

by tensegrist

7/15/2026 at 4:24:14 AM

> 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

by kalleboo

7/15/2026 at 1:48:16 PM

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"

by pivo

7/15/2026 at 5:07:37 PM

“It’s a Unix system. I know this.” was definitely the line from the movie most quoted in online spaces in the 90s.

by dhosek

7/15/2026 at 7:15:45 PM

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.

by kraquepype

7/15/2026 at 5:11:14 PM

I still quote this line at work all the time. Basically whenever anyone asks me if I know how to do something on the computer

by cortesoft

7/15/2026 at 8:01:53 PM

This is such a cool anecdote. I have added it to the page!

by fabiensanglard

7/15/2026 at 2:07:48 PM

The line at my workplace was "It's a Unix system... WE'RE SCREWED!"

by Hizonner

7/15/2026 at 1:54:22 PM

That’s amazing! I live next to their former office. Do you know which theater they rented out?

by laidoffamazon

7/15/2026 at 2:55:21 PM

It was a long time ago so I can't say for certain, but she and I both remember it being the Kendall Sq. cinema.

by pivo

7/15/2026 at 9:00:00 AM

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.

by amccollum

7/15/2026 at 9:05:00 AM

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

by kalleboo

7/15/2026 at 5:52:44 PM

I absolutely knew who made this video before clicking on the link too

by krabizzwainch

7/15/2026 at 8:36:22 PM

What a cool anecdote. I have added it to the article!

by fabiensanglard

7/15/2026 at 11:23:53 AM

How was the syncing actually achieved?

by _def

7/15/2026 at 4:17:53 PM

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genlock

by toast0

7/15/2026 at 5:06:17 AM

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaNuVR75cwY

by gdubs

7/15/2026 at 5:25:08 AM

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:)

by sosuke

7/15/2026 at 6:28:52 AM

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...

by pdpi

7/15/2026 at 6:01:15 PM

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.

by magesh_magi1

7/15/2026 at 11:03:38 AM

It’s a real classic. An amazing article super worth reading (and re-reading if it’s been a while) and almost infinitely quotable.

by Sharlin

7/15/2026 at 9:37:36 PM

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

by ngcc_hk

7/15/2026 at 9:03:50 AM

Also, the indoor park "tour" voiceover refers to "Thinking Machine supercomputers", which I never figured were a brand name until today!

by Arn_Thor

7/15/2026 at 5:03:31 PM

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

by pnw

7/15/2026 at 6:38:28 PM

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.)

by gdubs

7/15/2026 at 9:11:07 PM

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.

by pnw

7/15/2026 at 7:14:32 AM

Thinking Machines: "We are building a machine that will be proud of us."

by joshu

7/15/2026 at 5:36:47 AM

It’s so lame they changed the LEDs to meaning nothing.

by Mistletoe

7/15/2026 at 2:05:23 PM

I'd heard from my wife who worked at TMs that they did this so engineers would stop "wasting" time programming animations on those lights.

by pivo

7/15/2026 at 6:21:04 AM

On the upside, this means you can run the LED boards without the rest of the CM-5. Have one panel that still works.

by ma2t

7/15/2026 at 1:14:09 PM

I'd love to be able to add 1U or 2U of blinkenlights to my rack, even if the pattern was completely random.

by geerlingguy

7/15/2026 at 5:46:02 PM

Do you think it's coincidence the chip for Skynet looks so much like the Connection Machine?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UZeHJyiMG8

by Kye

7/15/2026 at 6:41:21 PM

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!

by gdubs

7/15/2026 at 6:34:22 AM

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).

by moffkalast

7/15/2026 at 4:24:09 AM

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?

by rakel_rakel

7/15/2026 at 8:23:12 AM

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

by solarkraft

7/15/2026 at 8:33:29 AM

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."

by mike_hearn

7/15/2026 at 9:42:17 AM

> ... "Creighton" ...

Do you mean Michael Crichton, the author of the original book?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(novel)

by ColinWright

7/15/2026 at 9:52:31 AM

Surely. The name is pronounced like Creighton.

by ahartmetz

7/15/2026 at 10:12:32 AM

The name rhymes with "frighten".

Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/crich...

Also a Source: Name is Scottish origin, I live in Scotland.

by nemesisj

7/15/2026 at 4:00:31 PM

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.

by marssaxman

7/15/2026 at 10:59:53 AM

I mixed up German and English pronunciation of "ei". The German one sounds like English "i", so it would be Crighton.

by ahartmetz

7/15/2026 at 11:59:34 AM

Yes, my mistake!

by mike_hearn

7/15/2026 at 4:02:06 PM

An academy award for software?

by Atotalnoob

7/15/2026 at 2:49:47 PM

Thanks for the link, and boy is that a whopper. Do my eyes deceive me or is there literally a shot of the computer looking at them from its computery perspective, through its screen, with some layer of visual digital artifacts over it at the 14 second mark?

by glenstein

7/15/2026 at 6:29:11 PM

What about Jurassic Park 2? Never saw it

by bigcityslider

7/15/2026 at 7:20:54 AM

"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.

by OwlsParlay

7/15/2026 at 9:09:42 PM

> 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.

by einsteinx2

7/15/2026 at 5:58:25 AM

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)

[1] https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision

by sedatk

7/15/2026 at 7:24:24 AM

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.

by ivolimmen

7/15/2026 at 2:28:37 PM

There's always NsCDE which should run on modern Linux. Haven't tried it myself.

https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS

7/15/2026 at 1:50:48 PM

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.

by MWil

7/15/2026 at 1:53:50 PM

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.

by MWil

7/15/2026 at 3:23:36 PM

> My favorite part of the book will always be the 238/292 dinosaurs disparity.

This and the scene where they realize they've been running on backup power the whole time are both fantastic

by ipdashc

7/15/2026 at 3:52:54 AM

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.

by yoyohello13

7/15/2026 at 12:12:35 PM

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

by notahacker

7/15/2026 at 4:09:47 AM

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.

by jambalaya8

7/15/2026 at 7:49:42 AM

On the other hand he also did a ‘climate change is fake’ book (state of fear).

by msh

7/15/2026 at 11:55:54 AM

That was a really, really bad book. By that time it feels like he was a shadow of his former page-turning self.

by ablation

7/15/2026 at 4:04:51 PM

yeah, not one of his best. not his worst, but not great.

by jambalaya8

7/15/2026 at 5:27:07 AM

It was kind of scary how prescient Jurassic Park was. Just swap genetics for AI and his warnings are incredibly applicable to modern times.

by yoyohello13

7/15/2026 at 6:54:01 AM

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.

by MrToadMan

7/15/2026 at 3:48:55 PM

or The Andromeda Strain. I was on the edge of my seat for the last half of the movie as a 10 year old when it came out. The book still holds up as a medical mystery - thriller and warning of unintended consequences.

by criticas

7/15/2026 at 12:15:21 PM

That’s an amazing connection, had no idea they were written by the same person but the underlying theme is pretty consistent.

by ricardobeat

7/15/2026 at 7:17:16 AM

Dolly, the cloned sheep. That was huge in the news.

by anthk

7/15/2026 at 9:45:40 AM

One of the greatest "bad" writers. On my top ten.

by avadodin

7/15/2026 at 1:36:49 PM

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....

by nobleach

7/15/2026 at 3:26:43 PM

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.

by somat

7/15/2026 at 12:18:19 PM

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.

by j5r5myk

7/15/2026 at 5:51:59 AM

> 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.

by JeremyHerrman

7/15/2026 at 5:46:48 PM

My family owned a Mac Portable (the backlit model). Running Word for Mac 5.1, it was a fantastic writing machine.

by js2

7/15/2026 at 1:37:42 PM

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.

by prohobo

7/15/2026 at 5:23:10 AM

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.

by nanolith

7/15/2026 at 3:53:29 AM

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.

by mrpippy

7/15/2026 at 4:48:40 AM

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?

by fabiensanglard

7/15/2026 at 2:44:50 PM

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.

by BearOso

7/15/2026 at 8:27:42 PM

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

by fabiensanglard

7/15/2026 at 9:59:13 AM

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!

by ericzawo

7/15/2026 at 7:43:41 AM

It feels like 1990s movies were the heaviest on computers/gadgets. Jurassic Park has a programmer as a main character, GoldenEye has two.

by bigcityslider

7/15/2026 at 6:08:31 PM

Oh, guess Jurassic Park has two programmer main characters if you count the one who knows Unix

by bigcityslider

7/15/2026 at 7:46:06 AM

> 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.

by ianbooker

7/15/2026 at 6:03:16 PM

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 :)

by bigcityslider

7/15/2026 at 11:59:53 AM

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.

https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/

by alexpotato

7/15/2026 at 1:36:15 PM

"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).

by MWil

7/15/2026 at 2:23:16 PM

Or since the equipment was on loan, the marketers requested hero shots of the equipment.

by xattt

7/15/2026 at 3:14:55 PM

I know I'm being a Crichton/Spielberg fanboy when I ask for the lore equivalent of Occam's Razor - isn't it more likely my favorite creators did this most impressively??

by MWil

7/15/2026 at 2:45:29 PM

I feel like there should be an online museum dedicated to reproducing the graphics in movies, as faithfully as possible.

Especially awesome if film-makers started DONATING their video assets to the museum.

by MattCruikshank

7/15/2026 at 3:50:29 AM

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 :)

by smaili

7/15/2026 at 11:49:32 AM

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.

by windenntw

7/15/2026 at 6:22:24 AM

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.

by decimalenough

7/15/2026 at 9:02:35 AM

Rock? You were lucky! We used to have to hand pick our zeros and ones from sparse clouds of hydrogen and helium!

by Intermernet

7/15/2026 at 10:56:11 AM

Sometimes we didn’t even have ones, I wrote a whole database once using only zeros. - dilbert

by chasd00

7/15/2026 at 11:55:11 PM

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

by linksnapzz

7/15/2026 at 10:56:36 AM

god forbid if you got a parahydrogen vs a orthohydrogen hydrogen. That reverse spin really messed up the 1's.

by jsymolon

7/15/2026 at 4:52:44 PM

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.

by SoftTalker

7/15/2026 at 9:44:34 AM

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)

by pjc50

7/15/2026 at 1:03:41 PM

Only if you use today's standard bitrates. Back when storage and bandwidth constraints were real, mp3s came predominantly in 128kbps, which works out to 1MB per minute. The average pop song would only be 3.5 MB in size.

by tremon

7/15/2026 at 4:50:54 PM

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.

by NetMageSCW

7/15/2026 at 1:31:10 PM

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

by jguimont

7/15/2026 at 7:26:06 AM

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...

by ivolimmen

7/15/2026 at 11:09:34 AM

Biggest lesson of Jurassic Park: Don't hire only one sysadmin

by walrus01

7/15/2026 at 1:03:01 PM

should force my company to watch it with that in mind lol

by exhumet

7/15/2026 at 3:51:28 AM

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.

by yjftsjthsd-h

7/15/2026 at 6:04:08 AM

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.

by dlcarrier

7/15/2026 at 8:28:45 AM

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.

by dmurray

7/15/2026 at 7:40:59 AM

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?

by veltas

7/15/2026 at 8:42:38 AM

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.

by kalleboo

7/15/2026 at 9:48:17 AM

> 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.

by hananova

7/15/2026 at 12:37:02 PM

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

by kalleboo

7/15/2026 at 8:38:29 AM

Hammond spared no expense except when it came to Nedry, which was a critical mistake.

by Mountain_Skies

7/15/2026 at 1:56:36 PM

According to Nedry.

by actionfromafar

7/15/2026 at 9:00:00 AM

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).

by SyzygyRhythm

7/15/2026 at 10:06:14 AM

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.

by ahartmetz

7/15/2026 at 4:02:41 AM

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.

by ColdStream

7/15/2026 at 11:06:37 AM

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.

by chasd00

7/15/2026 at 4:08:49 AM

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.

by LeoPanthera

7/15/2026 at 4:17:46 AM

Right. I just mean that macs running pre-Darwin Mac OS seem an odd choice.

by yjftsjthsd-h

7/15/2026 at 6:02:32 AM

They’re an odd choice now. Back then they would have made sense as a UI to the Unix machines.

by MomsAVoxell

7/15/2026 at 7:20:42 AM

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.

by anthk

7/15/2026 at 7:54:39 AM

The early web was born on the back of Mac's connecting to SGI machines...

by aa-jv

7/15/2026 at 10:22:24 AM

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.

by ahartmetz

7/15/2026 at 12:33:05 PM

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..)

by aa-jv

7/15/2026 at 2:40:58 PM

They even had the "WebFORCE" branding with the "to author and serve" tagline! I also did a lot of early web work on an Indy, and we hosted on a Challenge!

I have a Challenge S right now, and when I got it the drive had web hosting setup for a car dealer.

by fleeno

7/15/2026 at 4:15:48 PM

OK, I see that an Indy went for about the same price as a SPARCstation 5 in 1993. I knew about the low-cost Indy, but not that it was that low cost (for a UNIX workstation, about $5000).

by ahartmetz

7/15/2026 at 12:25:01 PM

That's a waste for an SGI machine. SGI's were mainly known for 3D stuff.

by anthk

7/15/2026 at 12:33:45 PM

The Indy was a very popular platform for building an early web presence. I know, because I used it for multiple, major media companies who were getting onto the train.

by aa-jv

7/15/2026 at 4:15:03 AM

true. the book was written before Windows was released.

by jambalaya8

7/15/2026 at 3:17:38 PM

The book came out in 1990, the same year Windows 3.0 was released. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and 2.0 was released in 1987.

by bradyd

7/15/2026 at 4:00:04 PM

Almost noone used Windows until Windows 3.1. Not even engineering colleges. For intents and purposes, Windows does not really exist til 3.1 for most people. And that didn't even have a TCP/IP stack native; you had to install WinSock.

by jambalaya8

7/15/2026 at 7:21:35 AM

More than high end, low-mid end for journalists, book writing and editing people, graphic designers, magazine producers and whatnot. Really high end machines were the Sun and SGI ones.

by anthk

7/15/2026 at 4:13:19 AM

A Quadra 700 could run A/UX 3.0 or higher, which would make it relatively pleasant for the macs and unix workstations to interoperate (provided you spared no expense).

by RodgerTheGreat

7/15/2026 at 4:19:48 AM

In addition to A/UX, there were X window servers for classic Mac OS, with the companies making them selling it as a cheaper alternative to get a graphic UNIX terminal

by kalleboo

7/15/2026 at 4:53:38 PM

Wow, TIL! I moved from a Linux desktop to a Mac when OS X was new, and thought it was cool that I could run an X server locally. I didn't have much experience with classic Mac OS, and never would have guessed there was an X server for it.

by rconti

7/15/2026 at 4:36:25 AM

Macs probably would've been a reasonable choice for all the administrative/office tasks (emails, spreadsheets, presentations, all that jazz), leaving the heavy lifting to the IRIX boxen. Probably would've also been the typical first choice for GUI-driven applications (like NedryLand).

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

by yellowapple

7/15/2026 at 4:48:32 AM

The Jurassic park crew supposedly had a lot of money, and I would argue that any computer nerd, at the time depicted, would have gone with that combo. SGI for Unix and the power and Macs for admin. I would have.

by bjelkeman-again

7/15/2026 at 5:35:46 AM

Pretty much. This was at the period where Macs were in an unfortunate middle ground. Still great at UI heavy stuff but not hitting the higher performance of top end machines or the low price of PC's. They still had a decent place in Office settings, education and libraries but that was about it. Of course after Windows 3 came along in 1990 the UI advantage started to erode but wasn't quiet there yet by the time this movie came along.

by ColdStream

7/15/2026 at 10:30:13 AM

SGI machines mostly cost a lot of money for the 3D graphics hardware. They didn't make much sense for other purposes.

by ahartmetz

7/15/2026 at 4:05:57 PM

If you were already an IRIX shop, the servers were performant for a lot of uses. SGI did networking and disk I/O at least as well as Sun, IBM, and HP. We ran NFS and Perforce for hundreds of developers on SGI servers.

by criticas

7/15/2026 at 7:14:20 AM

Macintosh and SGI (+AIX, various Unix) were in fact a common combination used as desktop and backend server respectively in many 1990's scientific labs including biology labs.

by pishpash

7/15/2026 at 4:12:43 AM

I can see the SGI machines. Those were top of the line things (though sort of more for rendering...). The macs seem weird. I still remember wondering if he meant svr3 or svr4.

by jambalaya8

7/15/2026 at 4:18:54 AM

Right - if it was all SGI, or even a mix of unix workstations, I wouldn't have blinked. It's just the macs that throw me.

by yjftsjthsd-h

7/15/2026 at 8:38:18 AM

Why? Hybrid systems were and still are common. Today a common IT setup is Macs connecting to UNIX servers over the network.

by mike_hearn

7/15/2026 at 4:03:43 PM

I think it was more about Macs not being used for scientific applications much until the 2000s. Up until a bunch of programmers up and switched to MacBooks, Apples were more usually used by more artistic types. They were quite big for writing and art stuff, then, mostly, though pricey. And no separate monitors.

by jambalaya8

7/15/2026 at 4:34:40 AM

Same. I'd have chosen some of those new Xerox Parc bad boys.

by jambalaya8

7/15/2026 at 1:47:28 PM

In the 90s, at SGI (at least in France) they had Macs as workstations for tasks that didn't require or weren't compatible with an expensive SGI computer (like running MS Office or sending faxes). They switched to SGI Indy and O2 (running SoftWindows95 to run MS Office) at some point around 95/96, but that was a pretty expensive option, and Softwindows95 was a dog unless you had a really fast R10000 O2.

by wazoox

7/15/2026 at 9:31:42 PM

About once a year I go on a journey to buy an Iris Crimson. I found an Onyx once but it sold an hour before I got there.

by xbar

7/15/2026 at 2:53:20 PM

According to the post, the first computer was in their trailer, but there's an earlier scene where they're using a monitor to view the raptor bones in a tent at the dig site. Not sure if that counts but I'd like to have learned more about that device.

by danielvaughn

7/15/2026 at 8:29:00 PM

I noticed that too but elected to not make it count.

by fabiensanglard

7/15/2026 at 3:11:34 PM

The attention to detail spent here was what sparked my original interest in computers which inevitably led to my career. as a young man, watching this movie I was amazed that one man and a bunch of computers could unleash such mayhem.

by JohnMakin

7/15/2026 at 5:25:02 PM

I randomly came across a YouTube video [1] on the history of After Effects that I found really interesting. Seems as if there is quite a bit of evidence that the Nedry animation was done with an early preview.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LQyhSI56gU

by vt240

7/15/2026 at 4:55:15 AM

This is why I love the internet! Thank you to the author for taking the time!

by sswn

7/15/2026 at 6:48:26 AM

Yeah this reminded me of “the good old days” of the internet when every site felt like this :)

by tomduncalf

7/15/2026 at 10:36:11 AM

fabiensanglard - thanks for all the wonderful posts about.. everything! While I started reading your blog when it was more focused on old games and C development, I still check it from time to time. I'm always blown away by the level of details you manage to dig up and present - no matter the subject.

by nallerooth

7/15/2026 at 4:45:09 PM

Thank you :) !

by fabiensanglard

7/15/2026 at 3:45:45 AM

And I was worried I wasn't going to have anything to read tonight.

by tikimcfee

7/15/2026 at 1:42:27 PM

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.

by nihilist_t21

7/15/2026 at 4:44:48 PM

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

by fabiensanglard

7/15/2026 at 11:07:26 PM

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.

by rawoul

7/15/2026 at 5:43:06 PM

Minor typo fix "SuperMach" > "SuperMatch

by jensenbox

7/15/2026 at 10:10:22 PM

I am lying on a bed in a house paid for in full by the obsession with Unix and SGI that this movie instilled in me as a child

by theodric

7/15/2026 at 1:13:50 PM

This is so cool that we need a new HN feature for this like a 'gold bar'. Dang can you build this?

by sgt

7/15/2026 at 1:55:43 PM

I used to have a script running that whenever somebody failed to SSH into my laptop, it would blurt out "I hate this hacker crap" [1]. I had mostly forgotten about it until I was at a conference and it starts going off - followed by a guy nobody knew quickly leaving.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfiQYRn7fBg

by bArray

7/15/2026 at 6:29:49 AM

Another detail worth mentioning via Taniwha [1] was Supermac had an engineer on set and configured the graphics cards to run the monitors at 24hz so they wouldn't have any banding when filmed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25392870

by npunt

7/15/2026 at 11:55:54 AM

Protip: all modern monitors and TVs can still run at 50HZ and you can configure Linux to use it all the time --> zero vsync micro jumps when running european software under ZX, Amiga or C64 emulators :)

by windenntw

7/15/2026 at 8:57:38 AM

> The filename whte_rbt.obj is not mentioned in the movie

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.

by wanda

7/15/2026 at 6:21:01 AM

In the 2nd image (clearest) and other images, there appears to be some binary encoding in red. It must encode something!

by jzer0cool

7/15/2026 at 10:33:33 AM

This is great - lovely detail.

by brandrick

7/15/2026 at 4:04:31 AM

And yet again I am reminded of how SGI was so far ahead of the graphics game and yet was absolutely demolished because others could see the potential for domestic add-on cards when SGI was focusing on entire work stations.

3DFX and Nvidia ultimately put them out of business.

by ColdStream

7/15/2026 at 5:28:29 AM

I’m not a scholar of the fall of SGI. But, I’m sure it has been documented in detail.

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.

by corysama

7/15/2026 at 6:12:23 AM

This is true. I was at SGI, and their entire business was optimized to serving the needs of very sophisticated customers who were themselves pushing the envelope. Absolutely great customers to work with. But SGI’s DNA couldn’t adjust to the low margin high volume consumer space.

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.

by JSR_FDED

7/15/2026 at 5:41:01 AM

Spot on. They had the tech advantages but the high margins of full work stations blinded them to the changing winds in the industry.

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.

by ColdStream

7/15/2026 at 7:31:46 AM

> 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?

by RetroTechie

7/15/2026 at 10:49:40 AM

They were offered one mass-market opportunity on a silver platter, which they took: When Nintendo asked them to design the N64 GPU. It didn't seem to be very profitable for them.

by ahartmetz

7/15/2026 at 8:40:09 AM

It's very unclear in that era that there is a big market for 3D graphics at home. So their big customers would buy the cheap cards but in low volumes -> bankruptcy. And maybe there's either no big consumer market, or it grows too slowly to replace the loss of their main business.

by mike_hearn

7/15/2026 at 7:53:38 AM

Hubris. And Microsoft.

by aa-jv

7/15/2026 at 7:26:10 AM

3dfx and nVidia even put Matrox out of business. The 1990's were a true competitive paradise up and down the stack, not like today.

by pishpash

7/15/2026 at 2:05:59 PM

This the the type of content I live for!

by Boardingmaybe

7/15/2026 at 4:52:57 AM

It's a shame that HPE doesn't make graphics workstations any more.

by aboardRat4

7/15/2026 at 11:57:04 AM

This is incredibly insightful!

by monolabs

7/15/2026 at 5:00:26 AM

Another good Jurassic Park content is this filming locations video. Almost everything can still be visited today https://youtu.be/34r8Ypxzkk4

by haunter

7/15/2026 at 7:03:30 AM

This post is the definition of why I like HN. You never know what random fun and interesting post will make it's way here.

by 14

7/15/2026 at 7:51:10 AM

Yeah, and at the same time it is the reason why I limit myself to scheduled visits so that I don't spend all day reading up on cool stuff instead of working.

by Markstar

7/15/2026 at 5:19:03 AM

https://www.jurassicsystems.com/

by ChrisArchitect

7/15/2026 at 2:39:47 PM

This is a 'classic' and I don't know why this isn't higher up the list. I actually opened the comments just to post it if no one already had.

by korse

7/15/2026 at 5:50:27 AM

Im curious how they got the digital version of Jaws to play on a computer in... 1992?

by superxpro12

7/15/2026 at 7:26:13 AM

By ripping it to Cinepak or MPEG from a VHS capture?

by anthk

7/15/2026 at 6:00:39 AM

Well, you know, a computer had to have been involved in that digital version of Jaws ..

by MomsAVoxell

7/15/2026 at 8:04:42 PM

And a certain director...

by MWil

7/15/2026 at 10:46:28 AM

Ah back in those days computers were still cheap.

by amelius

7/15/2026 at 4:13:41 PM

Lol, not compared to what they paid us :-)

by criticas

7/15/2026 at 9:11:07 AM

I like how the article has little notes saying "Trivia", when actually the whole article is trivia. (This isn't to detract from it, it's fun trivia and I enjoyed reading it!)

by BrenBarn

7/15/2026 at 9:03:25 AM

There used to be a really good video on YouTube that covered the code that was displayed on the screen. Unfortunately, it seems to have been removed from YouTube.

by bmitc

7/15/2026 at 4:01:50 AM

Guess my OS?

by KasianFranks

7/15/2026 at 4:49:18 AM

“It’s a Unix system. … I know this” XD

Back in the days when it was an MS-DOS world…

by bfung

7/15/2026 at 5:42:22 AM

Just wouldn't have hit the same.

"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!"

by ColdStream

7/15/2026 at 1:39:46 PM

The 3D file browser was one of the demo programs that came pre-installed on SGI machines, at least in the late '90s.

by Findecanor

7/15/2026 at 5:03:43 AM

plan9, obviously, philistine!

by ButlerianJihad

7/15/2026 at 6:52:20 AM

note that gr_osview has been reincarnated as xosview (available on most unix distros, a simple apt-get away on buntu)

by ur-whale

7/15/2026 at 10:57:07 AM

nice

by theo00

7/15/2026 at 11:58:59 AM

[dead]

by samso26

7/15/2026 at 9:00:18 AM

[flagged]

by nttylock

7/15/2026 at 11:59:47 AM

[dead]

by samso26

7/15/2026 at 8:15:44 AM

[flagged]

by daniel-smid

7/15/2026 at 7:01:59 AM

[dead]

by runtime_lens

7/15/2026 at 6:28:35 AM

[dead]

by fluencytax

7/15/2026 at 8:42:21 PM

[dead]

by tug2024

7/15/2026 at 5:11:01 AM

[dead]

by JCattheATM

7/15/2026 at 6:32:57 AM

I find it fascinating that I submitted this yesterday and it failed to get any traction then - is it the AI spam that has turned submitting stuff less visible?

by rcarmo

7/15/2026 at 6:35:18 AM

And yet, downvoting is still working within seconds of my commenting! Rock on HN, never change.

by rcarmo

7/15/2026 at 11:55:00 AM

In 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 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.

by TechRemarker

7/15/2026 at 6:16:14 PM

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/'
vs. just

    curl 'https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/00_11_15_Apple_Powerbook_100.webp'
The latter gives a 403.

by 986aignan

7/15/2026 at 12:15:58 PM

Safari is riddled with bugs in the beta, nothing websites can do about it.

by ricardobeat