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!?

Wow, Motorola had an iRadio before Apple released their first iPhone? I did not know that.

ok so it now begs the question... whos plane was this?

This is really cool information

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.

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.

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.

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!

The latest Jurassic park was more (bad) sci-fi than dinosaurs, and I’m not talking 3d printers. It was terrible.

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

I hate this hacker crap!

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.

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

They are shown in the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDha7nj4s10

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

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

GRiD Compass was the first portable computer in the now ubiquitous clamshell format, and it was launched in April 1982, several years before "Aliens". It was used in several high-profile applications, like in the NASA Space Shuttle and in some special operations of the US military. Therefore its use in the movie does not have any fantastic element in it.

They have patented the clamshell form, so all the early laptop 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).

Such a great scene. don't know why not in the regular version

Patrick Warburton probably has him beat.

You could probably make something like that with plexiglass

No kidding! The people directly involved give plenty of background info about it. That was an interesting read.