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

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B1FIDO 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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guerrilla an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	RajT88 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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jon-wood 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	B1FIDO 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.