[HN Gopher] Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
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Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
Author : exvi
Score : 163 points
Date : 2026-01-25 09:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.therpf.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.therpf.com)
| Jare wrote:
| Normally you don't want to read the comments, but if you're
| curious about the topic please make an exception here.
| kstrauser wrote:
| No kidding! The people directly involved give plenty of
| background info about it. That was an interesting read.
| shlip wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| darepublic wrote:
| Like mosquitos trapped in amber, preserving hidden blocks
| of knowledge
| YokoZar wrote:
| These forums still exist. Typically with much older and
| mature discussions, as the users have aged alongside the
| forums. Nothing is stopping you from joining them now.
|
| My Something Awful forums account is over 25 years old at
| this point. The software and standards and moderation
| style is approximately unchanged, complete with 10 dollar
| sign-up fee to keep out the spam.
| abanana wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sdrothrock wrote:
| Pretty high on the RPF, actually! Especially in the early
| days, a lot of film, prop, and design industry professionals
| would congregate there and exchange information or big shop
| folklore. It was a pretty cool place (not saying it hasn't
| continued to be one, but I haven't been a regular in probably
| 20 years).
| jansan wrote:
| Wow, Motorola had an iRadio before Apple released their first
| iPhone? I did not know that.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "iPhone" was an Infogear, later Cisco, trademark, for the
| InfoGear iPhone (1997--2000 / InfoGear, Cisco/Linksys 2006--
| 2007), which was licenced to Apple.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(internet_appliance)>
|
| <https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/cisco-infogear-
| iphon...>
| calgoo wrote:
| It was licensed... eventually :) Cisco where quick to bring
| Apple to court if i remember correctly.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I was at Cisco when the Apple iPhone was announced. It
| was rumored to be happening, so Cisco rushed out a
| Linksys VoIP(?) phone rebranded (it might have just been
| a sticker) as an "iPhone" so they could defend the
| trademark. They quickly reached an agreement with Apple.
| I remember they might have been getting their VPN
| included on the device. I'm sure there was a similar
| issue with iOS, and that caused me to get a lot of not-
| so-relevant emails from recruiters looking for mobile
| devs.
| swyx wrote:
| ok so it now begs the question... whos plane was this?
| egiboy wrote:
| The question that flew under the radar ;)
| worldofmeden wrote:
| This is really cool information
| dbushell wrote:
| 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.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| The latest Jurassic park was more (bad) sci-fi than dinosaurs,
| and I'm not talking 3d printers. It was terrible.
| rusk wrote:
| 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.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I read the book a few months ago and was shocked by this too.
| simonw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Just don't feed it the terminator movies, or the matrix.
| rotexo wrote:
| Paul Rudd's computer (~2009?) was to me probably the most
| accurate prediction regarding genAI
| (https://youtu.be/a8K6QUPmv8Q)
| RubberbandSoul wrote:
| They are shown in the movie:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDha7nj4s10
| cubefox wrote:
| 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
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| 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.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I'd be curious if someone has tracked down the first of each
| modern thing
|
| Dick Tracy (1933) had a smart watch - personal communicator
|
| Bell Labs (1938) had video calls (facetime)
|
| The Foundation (1951) had info tablets
|
| No idea if they are the first of each
| Basje wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jon-wood wrote:
| They had at least one Cray on site in the novel, a few SGI
| workstations seems very plausible.
| B1FIDO wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bdbdbdb wrote:
| Huh, I had no idea sgi was not pc hardware. I just assumed
| they made PCs with their own OS
| cvwright wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Back then there were quite a few competing architectures
| and UNIXes to go with them. SGI MIPS with Irix, IBM had
| POWER with AIX and later Linux, DEC had Alpha Tru64 UNIX
| and VMS (not a UNIX), Sun SPARC with Solaris, HP had HA-
| RISC with HP-UX. Only SPARC and POWER survived for long
| and only POWER survived until today as far as I know.
| Solaris of course lives on in various forms. The old
| UNIXes I guess mostly do not, being displaced almost
| entirely by Linux and BSDs.
| dcrazy wrote:
| IBM apparently still releases updates for AIX on POWER.
| apaprocki wrote:
| Completely possible. In the early 90s everyone was buying SGI
| Indys to run Apache on and put the cool "Powered by SGI"
| badge on their site. I admin'd a local ISP then and that Indy
| was on my desk and IRIX was my daily driver. Their UI just
| felt leagues beyond other commercial Unices of the time, so
| rather than being plausible, I'd expect it due to the
| lab/science/dataviz aspect.
|
| edit: Just last night a friend was watching MiB and Tommy Lee
| Jones looks at a Motif UI. It was obviously SGI but it was
| IRIS ViewKit and not the later Interactive Development
| Environment. Narrowed down likely creator being Van Ling from
| Banned From The Ranch Entertainment. If you're out there...
| kilroy123 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Love it, Samuel L and pre-Newman in the same scene! (Well,
| almost.)
| jasongill wrote:
| I hate this hacker crap!
| jdshaffer wrote:
| Why are people downvoting this? It's just a quote from the
| movie...
| mrgriscom wrote:
| The circuit breaker from the restoring power scene is real too:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=westinghouse+spb-100&udm=2
| crims0n wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > it puts tension into the spring
|
| Well it certainly put tension into the scene! Thanks.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| We have ones like that at work for doing generator switchover
| - talking about Aggreko 20-foot shipping container generators
| providing hundreds of kW to power a pair of UPSes the size of
| a full-size Ford Transit, not your cute little 130-from-
| Hofer-pull-the-string-puttputtputt genny ;-)
|
| You pump up the handle to charge a pneumatic cylinder and
| when you cut over it throws a set of three contacts about the
| size of a first-gen Kindle from one side to the other,
| switching from incoming mains to genny power in about 1/100th
| of a second.
|
| It goes with a hell of a bang.
| echelon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| dmd wrote:
| My former employer, Ab Initio, has a Connection Machine in
| the basement. (Ab Initio was founded by the same person as
| Thinking Machines, and many/most of the early employees
| were from there.)
| jasongill wrote:
| 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!
| paulcole wrote:
| 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.
| bartread wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| bartread wrote:
| > Therefore its use in the movie does not have any fantastic
| element in it.
|
| That's very subjective.
|
| I simply didn't know any of this before I saw that clip and
| was surprised to see a couple of recognisably modern form
| factor laptops. It sounds like there may have been several
| models of GRiD Compass but, as of a few days ago, I'd never
| heard of any of them.
|
| The early to mid 80s was still very much also the era of the
| luggable, but in 1986 I'd never seen either a luggable or a
| laptop, and whilst 10 year old me probably wouldn't have been
| super-impressed with a heavy computer in a suitcase, I
| probably would have been agog at a laptop. I don't think I
| even knew what a laptop was until maybe the early 90s when
| they started to become a bit more commonplace.
| adrian_b wrote:
| When GRiD Compass was launched, I was in high school and I
| used to read regularly in a public library a magazine named
| "Electronics", which had been very important between 1930
| and 1995 and where many significant news in the electronics
| and computing industries were announced first.
|
| The launch of GRiD Compass started with a campaign of
| advertising in that magazine, which had very spectacular
| photos of the computer demonstrating various applications,
| especially due to its unusual flat electroluminescent
| display with a nice bright orange color.
|
| Even if I usually am immune to advertising, I was very
| impressed by the GRiD Compass advertisements, so I have
| been remembering them until today, despite never seeing one
| in real life.
|
| While GRiD Compass made me aware since the beginning of the
| existence of the laptop format (the word "laptop" has been
| coined one year after the launch of GRiD Compass by another
| company, Gavilan, which has introduced a computer copying
| the clamshell form, but made at a lower price, with a
| proportionally lower quality), I also had the opportunity
| of using laptops only many years later, starting in the
| year 2000.
| retube wrote:
| Such a great scene. don't know why not in the regular version
| davisr wrote:
| Not a single mention of General Magic or Magic Cap, the software
| running on the tablet? Smh.
| raffael_de wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Patrick Warburton probably has him beat.
| qingcharles wrote:
| If you like trying to identify everyday objects used as props in
| movies:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/
| mnemotronic wrote:
| It looks like he's using my beloved Northgate keyboard.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I still want the Gibson towers from the movie Hackers
|
| https://i0.wp.com/scifiinterfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| You could probably make something like that with plexiglass
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