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Comment by jfoutz | Hacker News Reader

I always argued with people about the SGI UI for the Indy being real and not movie magic. I didn't realize that movie had a connection machine.

That's amazing.

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The book specifies that the park is ran by Cray supercomputer (IIRC there it even mentions particular model, probably Y-MP). For the movie it was replaced by CM-5, because it was deemed even more visually stunning, mainly because while Crays often have interesting industrial design (often because of the finite propagation speed of copper wire) they lack the blinkenlights.

IIRC, the default blinkenlighs on the CM-5 was apparently a LED for each of the 4096 "cores" (really a SIMD-lane), and whether or not that particular "core" is active. On means that SIMD-lane is active, off means its inactive. Kind of a glorified Microsoft Windows "CPU Performance" screen, except physical.

Given the regular pattern in Jurassic Park, I assume they reprogrammed the LEDs to look more futuristic.

People who programmed those machines said that people often asked for programs that used those LED matrices as a display.

I read somewhere that the pattern displayed by the CM-5 in the film was referred to as 'common and pleasing #6', as close as I can recall it. I've not seen a definition of the pattern other than it's actual output.

IIRC on CM-1/2 the LEDs reflected state of conditional execution of the individual VLSI packages (there is one LED per package, not one LED per CPU), on CM-5 it is just a bunch of LED matrices controlled more or less globally by I assume some BMC-like thing.

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