frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/index.html
100•vinhnx•1h ago

Comments

tikimcfee•1h ago
And I was worried I wasn't going to have anything to read tonight.
smaili•57m ago
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 :)

yjftsjthsd-h•56m ago
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.
ColdStream•44m ago
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.

LeoPanthera•38m ago
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.
jambalaya8•32m ago
true. the book was written before Windows was released.
yjftsjthsd-h•29m ago
Right. I just mean that macs running pre-Darwin Mac OS seem an odd choice.
jambalaya8•34m ago
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.
yjftsjthsd-h•28m ago
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.
jambalaya8•12m ago
Same. I'd have chosen some of those new Xerox Parc bad boys.
RodgerTheGreat•34m ago
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).
kalleboo•27m ago
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
yellowapple•11m ago
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

yoyohello13•54m ago
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.

jambalaya8•37m ago
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.
mrpippy•54m ago
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.
KasianFranks•45m ago
Guess my OS?
ColdStream•43m ago
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.

kalleboo•40m ago
> 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

fabiensanglard•14m ago
Thanks, I am going to update the article!
rakel_rakel•23m ago
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?

kalleboo•23m ago
> 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 from the code included with the Macintosh Programmers Workshop, Apple's original IDE for the Mac.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer's_Worksho...

Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/index.html
100•vinhnx•1h ago•22 comments

Vancouver PD website features Quick Escape button that wipes itself from history

https://vpd.ca/
190•LookAtThatBacon•4h ago•70 comments

TS-2026-009: Insecure argument handling in Tailscale SSH permitted root access

https://tailscale.com/security-bulletins
76•jervant•3h ago•33 comments

Bonsai 27B: A 27B-Class model that runs on a phone

https://prismml.com/news/bonsai-27b
497•xenova•10h ago•184 comments

Dependabot version updates introduce default package cooldown

https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-14-dependabot-version-updates-introduce-default-package-coo...
136•woodruffw•7h ago•81 comments

Solving 20 Erdős Problems with 20 Codex Accounts Running in Parallel

https://www.starfleetmath.com/
81•colin7snyder•4h ago•30 comments

The Tower Keeps Rising

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/7/13/the-tower-keeps-rising/
397•cdrnsf•11h ago•177 comments

Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left

https://mindgard.ai/blog/cursor-0day-when-full-disclosure-becomes-the-only-protection-left
300•Synthetic7346•10h ago•143 comments

Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt [pdf]

https://www.bis.org/publ/bisbull120.pdf
118•1vuio0pswjnm7•6h ago•65 comments

How I use HTMX with Go

https://www.alexedwards.net/blog/how-i-use-htmx-with-go
155•gnabgib•8h ago•37 comments

LeMario: Training a JEPA World Model on Super Mario Bros

https://www.benjamin-bai.com/projects/lemario
69•kevinjosethomas•6h ago•9 comments

An unusual way for your DHCP server to run out of dynamic IPs

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/DHCPServerAndScreamingHost
41•speckx•4d ago•7 comments

How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

https://jola.dev/posts/how-to-stop-claude-from-saying-load-bearing
470•shintoist•17h ago•521 comments

Data centers have hiked electricity prices on the public by $23B

https://fortune.com/2026/07/14/data-centers-23-billion-electricity-bills/
129•measurablefunc•4h ago•69 comments

Mathematical texts from a Maya site in Guatemala identify an ancient astronomer

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02170-8
61•homarp•17h ago•16 comments

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/07/microsoft-patches-a-record-570-security-flaws/
65•robin_reala•7h ago•30 comments

I'm a USB-C Maximalist

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/im-a-usb-c-maximalist/
208•speckx•13h ago•307 comments

The Trade in Looted Antiquities Endures for One Reason: Demand

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/matt-campbell-cambodia-looted-antiquities-2779870
8•derbOac•2d ago•1 comments

The largest available Minecraft world, totalling 15 TB

https://2b2t.place/1million
183•_____k•3d ago•61 comments

The kids with phones are alright

https://heatherburns.tech/2026/07/08/the-kids-with-phones-are-alright/
163•JumpCrisscross•3d ago•111 comments

Probably check on your smart appliances

https://xeiaso.net/notes/2026/check-your-smart-tv/
45•xena•6h ago•16 comments

Andon (manufacturing)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andon_(manufacturing)
4•tony•3d ago•0 comments

The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/jg-ballard-illuminated-man-christopher-priest-nina-allan/
45•Caiero•1d ago•9 comments

The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/open-source/zero-cost-fallacy-open-source-agentic-era
122•backlit4034•4d ago•99 comments

Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler
203•julesrms•2d ago•86 comments

Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

https://www.artfish.ai/p/offloading-thinking-to-ai
405•yenniejun111•13h ago•404 comments

Ambient Website Background Clouds

https://github.com/paradise-runner/background-clouds
13•dividedcomet•5d ago•3 comments

Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security

https://gwern.net/guardian-angel
73•andsoitis•15h ago•13 comments

Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works

https://www.verbaprima.com/
153•plicerin•13h ago•89 comments

Kontigo (YC S24) Is Hiring (Head of Security)

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kontigo/jobs/uNttrlv-head-of-security
1•jecastillof•11h ago