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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Canonically, John Hammond spared no expense.

SGI and Apple computers didn't provide the most bang for the buck, or even the most bang, but they sure did use up the most bucks. Other than high prices, and the target market that goes with it, they couldn't have been more different.

The SGI systems were 3D rendering beasts, with a significant portion of their hardware dedicated to the task, making them fast machines for any task, because of the underlying capabilities needed to support that 3D hardware, and they were stable because of the robust Unix operating system. The Apple computers ran on commodity 68040 and an OS that couldn't preempt the software running on it, so a crashed application would take down the whole system.

A stock Amigo computer, at half the price of the Apple system, was just as capable, but supported better upgrades for live video processing. An IBM PS/2 computer running OS/2 would have had the stability of a Unix system, on lower-priced commodity hardware.

If they needed the 3D capabilities of the SGI systems, that was the only option, but if they otherwise only wanted to mess around with video, Amiga computers would have been better than the Apple ones, at a lower price. If they needed something robust, where a user process couldn't crash the system, other Unix workstations would have worked just as well, at a lower price, and an OS/2 workstation would have also worked, at a much, much lower price. Also, there's a rational to having a video-capable Amiga computer along with a robust network-focused Unix or OS/2 workstation, but if you already have an SGI workstation at your desk, you wouldn't really need another computer.

The computers make more sense for someone making movies than someone running an elaborate zoo, but considering how often characters in Michael Crichton's books are authors themselves, it makes sense that characters in his movies to have an affinity toward making movies, and buying the computers that would be used to do so.

And the out-of-universe explanation is that the Jurassic Park production team had access to SGI "3D rendering beasts" because they needed to render some CGI dinosaurs. So these are both what they had to hand, and what the producers associated with powerful computers.

Interesting though in retrospect they chose good platforms, Mac and UNIX are still around and flourishing and OS/2 died a death, although would a lot of OS/2 stuff have run on Windows?

Hammond spared no expense except when it came to Nedry, which was a critical mistake.

According to Nedry.

Wasn't the Amiga essentially limited to interlaced video? That basically relegated it to a machine for games or realtime NTSC/PAL video effects.

Also I was never a big Amiga guy so I'm not sure, did they have an equivalent to QuickTime and Cinepak in 1992 to play video clips? Microsoft hadn't released Video for Windows yet.

> Wasn't the Amiga essentially limited to interlaced video?

No, it supported very high res screens too, but it required special screens such as the A2024 (15" 1024x1024!) Later on there were also RTG graphics cards available.

> Did they have an equivalent to QuickTime and Cinepak in 1992 to play video clips?

The Amiga's graphics were ahead of its time, but the tradeoffs they chose proved very unsuitable for video playback applications (specifically the planar nature.) There eventually did exist video playback tools, but they either assumed the presence of an RTG card, or post-dated the death of the Amiga by several decades.

Thanks for the reply!

I looked up the A2024

The monitor is quite unique in that it contains an internal framebuffer which is controlled via the RGBI lines of the video port [...] The monitor manages to achieve the high resolutions by effectively buffering four Amiga screens, whereby each screen displays a portion of the overall picture. Because of this, the "effective" refresh rate decreases to around 10-15Hz (software configurable). [...] It seems that the monitor by be able to individually refresh the separate quadrants of the screen, as the quadrant which contains the mouse cursor appears to be updated more frequently

What an amazing hack! Reminds me of the lengths people went to add larger external displays to the early 9" Macs using SCSI graphics cards that basically re-implemented QuickDraw

Movie-Nedry struck me as a certain kind of hacker trope (but whom I've also met in real life!) where part of their "compensation" is access to unusual and high end computer hardware. It's irrelevant whether it's the best tool for the job (and as the page notes, Nedry seems to use his fancy SGI system mostly to render 3D chess). But, at least in principle, it's relatively cheap payment to keep your programmers happy (though it didn't exactly work out in the movie).

I don't think that it makes much economic sense. That hardware was extremely expensive at the time, developer salaries weren't as high, and hardware progress was extremely fast, so the computers had to be replaced every two or three years to remain practical, not just cool.

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.

At my college there was a tiny tucked away lab that had these giant old dot matrix printers that were very very fast and noisy (they were under plexiglass covers). I don’t remember why I was in there or what I was doing but I must have sent a binary to them because they took off and were printing the winding characters. The admins banned me after that. Heh by junior year there were a handful of labs on campus that when I walked in the gray beards (probably grad students) just pointed at the door and I walked right back out.

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.

Right. I just mean that macs running pre-Darwin Mac OS seem an odd choice.

They’re an odd choice now. Back then they would have made sense as a UI to the Unix machines.

Not much because a click on a menu would almost halt the entire network by design. Cheaper dumb Unix terminals were a thing where you jut used telnet and X forwarding.

“Just used Telnet” and “cheaper dumb Unix terminals” .. hmm .. not to be bold or anything, but I’ve been using Unix since the folding paper terminal days .. and as I remember it personally, it kinda went like this: paper-terminal connected to modem (telephone suction cup model) .. hazeltine serial terminal and either 2 long RS232 cables strung to the ops room if you were local, or a HAYES modem or two .. but still only a tty, no addressable graphics - these kinds of ‘cheap’ terminal accessories were kind of the thing for most of the early 80’s, then around mid to late 80’s, PC’s got Ethernet, C:\TERM\TERM.COM, etc..

Those ‘cheaper dump Unix terminals’ with Ethernet you might be remembering were not so dumb, but rather smart - i.e. had Ethernet and addressable graphics, and an onboard X server .. i.e. dumb X terminals.

When Mac got X, or at least Ethernet (and thus sockets), it was a pretty comfortable way to term to the Unix box, since the Mac wasn’t dumb, and could do plenty and plenty of other things ..

You can forward X windows over slip/plip or ppp running on rs232.

TCP/IPover serial lines is a thing!

True, but you need more than a ‘dumb terminal’ to do that.. you need an actual networking stack, ppp/slip driver, etc.

The early web was born on the back of Mac's connecting to SGI machines...

Err, no. SGIs were first very expensive (3D) graphics workstations and later mostly also-rans in some other markets like storage and general-purpose big servers.

Servers were Sun, x86, HP-PA, IBM R6000 RISC (and probably some more UNIX / RISC systems). Workstations were PC, Sun, Apple (mostly for graphics / design), some NeXT.

Er, yes.

Many media companies onboarded to the web in the early 90's using SGI machines.

The Indy was a very popular multi-host system for such things. It was not a graphics powerhouse and in many low-end configurations its primary function was web serving.

(Disclaimer: I helped build the early web using SGI systems, with many major media companies as clients..)

They even had the "WebFORCE" branding with the "to author and serve" tagline! I also did a lot of early web work on an Indy, and we hosted on a Challenge!

I have a Challenge S right now, and when I got it the drive had web hosting setup for a car dealer.

There's a good series of articles on WebForce by the person at SGI who had the idea.

Starts here:

https://therealmccrea.com/2014/01/09/january-1994-a-very-goo...

That was a delightful read - in those days I'd already been involved in starting a major ISP, and .. burned out from that .. dove straight into the web, founding one of SoCals' first web development agencies, in that same time period - late '94 - early '95. We had brand new Indy's delivered, a contract with Prime Time Sports network and a few other Hollywood players, and .. it rocked .. until it didn't.

So it was really interesting to read the stories from the SGI side of things, straight from the source. We pushed those machines into places they didn't really belong (US Huntington Beach Womens Volleyball tournaments .. so much sand ..) and did things we shouldn't really be doing (Hi, Aleph One!), but .. so much fun.

I'll boot up my Octane2 for the memories this weekend, maybe I can still find some of the old sites we made with that clunky WebFORCE software ..

I also enjoyed that read, as a fellow SGI user.

OK, I see that an Indy went for about the same price as a SPARCstation 5 in 1993. I knew about the low-cost Indy, but not that it was that low cost (for a UNIX workstation, about $5000).

Maybe you also didn't know that it was marketed as a web server and in that capacity, was quite a bit more widely deployed than you might expect for such a machine ..

I easily spent $5000 on PC hardware in that era, just sayin’…

You could pay that much I guess, which would get you a Pentium in 1993.

That's a waste for an SGI machine. SGI's were mainly known for 3D stuff.

The Indy was a very popular platform for building an early web presence. I know, because I used it for multiple, major media companies who were getting onto the train.

Maybe; but compared to a Sun machine the Indy had better graphical capabilities. And far beyond from a PC and an Amiga.

You could always repurpose the SGI machine for anything else too.

The Indy had poor graphics capabilities, compared to the other desktop machines SGI was making at the time - I was excited to see what might have happened if SGI had kept going in this direction, and made a laptop.

Instead they did a deal with the devil and died.

I got a tiBook to use as a terminal for my SGI boxes at the time, and well now, 20 years later, a table full of Apple gear and the Octane2’s in storage, probably to be dusted off by a descendent some day .. it is sort of extraordinary that Apple ate SGI’s lunch in the Unix workstation department.

More than high end, low-mid end for journalists, book writing and editing people, graphic designers, magazine producers and whatnot. Really high end machines were the Sun and SGI ones.

true. the book was written before Windows was released.

The book came out in 1990, the same year Windows 3.0 was released. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and 2.0 was released in 1987.

Almost noone used Windows until Windows 3.1. Not even engineering colleges. For intents and purposes, Windows does not really exist til 3.1 for most people. And that didn't even have a TCP/IP stack native; you had to install WinSock.

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).

In the 90s, at SGI (at least in France) they had Macs as workstations for tasks that didn't require or weren't compatible with an expensive SGI computer (like running MS Office or sending faxes). They switched to SGI Indy and O2 (running SoftWindows95 to run MS Office) at some point around 95/96, but that was a pretty expensive option, and Softwindows95 was a dog unless you had a really fast R10000 O2.

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

Wow, TIL! I moved from a Linux desktop to a Mac when OS X was new, and thought it was cool that I could run an X server locally. I didn't have much experience with classic Mac OS, and never would have guessed there was an X server for it.

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

The Jurassic park crew supposedly had a lot of money, and I would argue that any computer nerd, at the time depicted, would have gone with that combo. SGI for Unix and the power and Macs for admin. I would have.

Pretty much. This was at the period where Macs were in an unfortunate middle ground. Still great at UI heavy stuff but not hitting the higher performance of top end machines or the low price of PC's. They still had a decent place in Office settings, education and libraries but that was about it. Of course after Windows 3 came along in 1990 the UI advantage started to erode but wasn't quiet there yet by the time this movie came along.

SGI machines mostly cost a lot of money for the 3D graphics hardware. They didn't make much sense for other purposes.

If you were already an IRIX shop, the servers were performant for a lot of uses. SGI did networking and disk I/O at least as well as Sun, IBM, and HP. We ran NFS and Perforce for hundreds of developers on SGI servers.

Macintosh and SGI (+AIX, various Unix) were in fact a common combination used as desktop and backend server respectively in many 1990's scientific labs including biology labs.

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.

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.

Why? Hybrid systems were and still are common. Today a common IT setup is Macs connecting to UNIX servers over the network.

I think it was more about Macs not being used for scientific applications much until the 2000s. Up until a bunch of programmers up and switched to MacBooks, Apples were more usually used by more artistic types. They were quite big for writing and art stuff, then, mostly, though pricey. And no separate monitors.

That came later as Windows became dominant but in the era Jurassic Park was written/filmed in, I think they were used for industrial and scientific uses as well.

Some of it was probably chosen to make it seem expensive. And back then, they were seen as probably the priciest computer the average American might have recognition of, while being somewhat exotic compared to the IBM and IBM knockoffs.

Same. I'd have chosen some of those new Xerox Parc bad boys.

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