Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)

114 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by exvi
(therpf.com)

41 Comments

shlip

8 hours ago

> It's the design mock up from the final presentation to Motorola for the iRadio (name later changed to Envoy).

> The head of frogdesign, Hartmut Esslinger met Spielberg on a plane and showed him this mockup. Steven asked if it could be used as a prop in the film, and Hartmut gave it to him.

cbdevidal

7 hours ago

It’s mind-blowing to me that the actual guy who designed it chimed in. Assuming it’s not a fake comment, what are the odds!?

eterm

7 hours ago

Much greater than now, given the open discoverability of the original post here, versus the walled-off content we have today, locked away in discord servers and the like.

Furthermore, the act of replying to that post will have bumped it right back to the top for everyone to see.

kasperset

24 minutes ago

I agree with this. We are much missing these forums with civil replies and clouded behind "influencer" culture, which is optimized for incentives. Pure discussions as in this example are such a stalwarts of open web.

On the other hand, small websites and forums can disappear but that openness allows platform like archive.org to capture and "fossilize" them.

abanana

6 hours ago

That's why I like HN, it seems to happen a lot here! Mention a piece of hardware or software, even something obscure from years ago, and half an hour later you've had an answer to your question from the designer or the CEO.

gopher_space

13 minutes ago

Me too. I'm just afraid that it's because there are shrinking pools of rationality on the internet. They're here for the same reason you are; HN doesn't suck nearly as much as the alternatives.

Basje

6 hours ago

Very cool. I saw Jurassic Park in the cinema and remember thinking that the Unix system that they used was some Hollywood fancy, but I learned much later that it was actually a prototype of a gui [0]. It appears that Spielberg was well-connected to tech people at the time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer

B1FIDO

6 hours ago

I mean actually the FSV that you refer to is a clone of the SGI IRIX utility, fsn, that was actually depicted on a live computer in the film.

SGI was well-known to the film industry, because their IRIX systems were basically the sine qua non of graphics workstations and powerhouses. SGI invested heavily in the graphical capabilities, including 3D rendering, and therefore when the industry graduated from Amigas with the "Video Toaster" they slid into SGI systems quite nicely.

So it stood to reason that a couple of them would show up in an actual film. How plausible it was to have SGI systems on-site at a Jurassic Park type lab? I don't know, but seems reasonable, if they were also crunching DNA numbers.

guerrilla

5 hours ago

Poor SGI. I used to love their website back in the 90s.

It's strange to think that alternative architectures were possible though and could get such a foothold in some industries. The specificity is mind-blowng. Everything is "PC"s today.

bdbdbdb

24 minutes ago

Huh, I had no idea sgi was not pc hardware. I just assumed they made PCs with their own OS

cvwright

16 minutes ago

They made a couple of Intel boxes in the very late 90s / very early 00s, but the company was already on the way out by that point.

RajT88

4 hours ago

It does blow my mind that back in the 90's that companies were rolling their own silicon and OS's without being absolute giants.

jon-wood

5 hours ago

They had at least one Cray on site in the novel, a few SGI workstations seems very plausible.

B1FIDO

5 hours ago

While it is true that Silicon Graphics eventually acquired Cray Computer, they did it after the novel, and the film's release, but I would suppose that even before the 1996 acquisition that SGI and Cray machines were very good partners, like peas in a pod.

It is important to remember that nobody who operated a Cray did it in isolation. The supercomputers always require some extra workstations arrayed around it in order to get stuff done. Of course, there were remote connections too, but often there would be at least one sort of "dedicated user console" that was closely coupled to the supercomputer itself. I believe that some supercomputers of that era were poorly equipped to actually handle interactive user sessions, and that's why.

mrgriscom

6 hours ago

The circuit breaker from the restoring power scene is real too: https://www.google.com/search?q=westinghouse+spb-100&udm=2

crims0n

4 hours ago

When I was a kid I always wondered why Dr. Sattler had to manually prime/charge the breaker before enabling it. Apparently it is because that model (and others like it) use a spring to quickly close the circuit. When she is priming it puts tension into the spring, and when she presses the button it quickly releases and completes the circuit. This is done to prevent arc flashes due to the high voltage and amperage, since the coiled spring snapping into place can complete the circuit much faster than any human pulling a lever could.

sandyarmstrong

4 hours ago

> it puts tension into the spring

Well it certainly put tension into the scene! Thanks.

jasongill

3 hours ago

I have a collection of pop culture prop items and this is definitely going on my ebay alerts list, would be cool to have on the wall of the garage... thank you for posting!

echelon

4 hours ago

As is the supercomputer.

It's the Thinking Machine Connection Machine CM-5

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

https://www.jurassic-pedia.com/cm-5-thinking-machine/

The LED panel is gorgeous:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Ko4qBkEcBM

A lot of people have replicated or restored these:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=qm6w57ZcJZQ

https://www.housedillon.com/posts/resurrected-led-panels/

---

I've always hoped the film series would be rebooted back to the original novel. The first film was a masterpiece, and everything that's followed has been increasingly awful. Dinosaurs and cloning are way too cool for that amount of disrespect.

I'd kill for an R-rated horror film (think Alien) based on the book, especially if it were set in 1980 and deeply scientific like the original. That was the only film in the series with believably smart characters, each pursuing complex motivations, with fulfilling character arcs. The plot focused on the people, and dinosaurs were the dressing.

linsomniac

2 hours ago

The National Cryptologic Museum outside Fort Meade has one or a few Connection Machines, a Cray, and all sorts of other computing and other gear. It's quite a worthwhile tour, IMHO. https://www.nsa.gov/museum/

dbushell

7 hours ago

Jurassic Park III (2001) has a 3D printer that’s central to a plot line. I know they have a long history but I remember thinking that was more sci-fi than the dinosaurs.

bartread

4 hours ago

I love stuff like this.

Often films and TV shows have anachronisms in them (like the very first episode, IIRC, of Narcos with the clearly very modern touchscreen photocopier where the screen has been covered with a piece of paper, or the BMW that wasn't released until the mid/late 1990s), but every so often you'll see something that is instead a flash of the future.

Due to #reasons I watched the sentry gun scene in Aliens for the first time in decades the other day. This scene only appears in the director's cut of the film. Anyway, bearing in mind it was released in 1986, imagine my utter shock when Hicks busts out a couple of laptops to monitor and manage the guns. The machines in question are a pair of GRiD Compasses, originally released in, I think, 1984. Imagine that: a laptop computer from 1984. They're not even that big and cumbersome.

Of course, the specs are laughable by today's standards but actually pretty decent for the period, and especially for portables. In terms of memory and raw CPU power they'd certainly have wiped the floor with the average home computer of the day, although graphics capabilities might have been non-existent, and sound would have been PC speaker at best.

So, yeah, Nedry with a tablet? I can buy that. His whole den/lair is like a toy box of the coolest hardware and software from the early 1990s. But for all the times I've seen the film, I've never spotted this before.

adrian_b

30 minutes ago

GRiD Compass was the first portable computer in the now ubiquitous clamshell format, and it was launched in April 1982.

They have patented the clamshell form, so all the early laptop manufacturers had to license their patent.

GRiD Compass was designed since the beginning with the main goal of being a computer that can be carried in a briefcase (at that time, engineers and programmers normally carried briefcases, not backpacks like today). This was somewhat similar with how the first "scientific" calculator had been designed by Hewlett-Packard, with the main goal of fitting inside a shirt pocket.

There have been a number of earlier portable computers, made by IBM, Xerox, Scrib, Sony, Epson, Osborne and a few others, but most of those were much more cumbersome and more difficult to carry (they were nicknamed "sewing machine" computers, for their size and weight), mainly because they had CRT displays, while GRiD Compass had a beautiful flat electroluminescent display.

Before GRiD Compass, there had also been a few Japanese portable computers with flat LCD screens, but in those the screen could not be folded, the body of the computer was in one piece, containing both the screen and the keyboard, like in an oversized calculator, so their screens were very small and they used very weak CPUs in comparison with GRiD Compass, which had an Intel 8086 (but it was not compatible with the IBM PC, as it was launched when the IBM PC was only 8 months old and not yet as important as it has become later).

kilroy123

6 hours ago

I love Jurassic Park, the movie, because it was so wildly ahead of its time in so many ways.

Also, mandatory https://jurassicsystems.com.

bloomingeek

5 hours ago

Love it, Samuel L and pre-Newman in the same scene! (Well, almost.)

raffael_de

3 hours ago

Wayne Knight aka Newman was - as far as I can tell - the most successful regular cast member from Seinfeld with respect to a movie career outside of that show.

paulcole

4 hours ago

Unrelated but I have long held a Jurassic Park Theory of Startups. The easier you can map yourself and coworkers to characters in Jurassic Park the bleaker the prospects of the company.

rusk

6 hours ago

In Arthur C Clarke’s 2001 a space odyssey, in the book, he describes a flat handheld device that is used for reading the New York Times. He can’t remember the exact details but the ergonomics he describes perfectly encapsulate the tablet devices we have today. I’m pretty certain he wrote it before the 1969 moon landing.

simonw

6 hours ago

The movie itself predates the moon landing - it came out in 1968.

It's astonishing to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey today and reflect on how well the production design has aged. That movie is coming up on 60 years old now!

The portrayal of AI has held up extraordinarily well too.

serf

5 hours ago

>The portrayal of AI has held up extraordinarily well too.

it's interesting to think that many of our current AIs were trained on our fiction in a weird self-fulfilling strange loop.

of course the portrayal aged well, the damn things are using the material as a mimicry source.

ThrowawayR2

an hour ago

The tablets that bridge officers were signing reports on from Star Trek TOS, which started airing in 1966, precedes that. They were boxier but clearly electronic.

markus_zhang

6 hours ago

I read the book a few months ago and was shocked by this too.

cubefox

4 hours ago

There is also a reading device with a single page in the 1961 Lem novel "Return from the Stars":

> Lem predicts the disappearance of paper books from the society. Lem even describes a reading device very much like a tablet computer that the main character Hal Bregg gets familiar with when he tries to find paper books and newspapers.

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

davisr

3 hours ago

Not a single mention of General Magic or Magic Cap, the software running on the tablet? Smh.

Jare

8 hours ago

Normally you don't want to read the comments, but if you're curious about the topic please make an exception here.