> 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.
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.
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.
"iPhone" was an Infogear, later Cisco, trademark, for the InfoGear iPhone (1997--2000 / InfoGear, Cisco/Linksys 2006--2007), which was licenced to Apple.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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!
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.
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/
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!?
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.
3 replies →
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.
1 reply →
ok so it now begs the question... whos plane was this?
Wow, Motorola had an iRadio before Apple released their first iPhone? I did not know that.
"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...>
2 replies →
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
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.
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.
4 replies →
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…
They had at least one Cray on site in the novel, a few SGI workstations seems very plausible.
1 reply →
The circuit breaker from the restoring power scene is real too: https://www.google.com/search?q=westinghouse+spb-100&udm=2
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.
> it puts tension into the spring
Well it certainly put tension into the scene! Thanks.
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.
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!
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.
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/
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.
The latest Jurassic park was more (bad) sci-fi than dinosaurs, and I’m not talking 3d printers. It was terrible.
I love Jurassic Park, the movie, because it was so wildly ahead of its time in so many ways.
Also, mandatory https://jurassicsystems.com.
Love it, Samuel L and pre-Newman in the same scene! (Well, almost.)
I hate this hacker crap!
Why are people downvoting this? It's just a quote from the movie...
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.
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).
> 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.
1 reply →
If you like trying to identify everyday objects used as props in movies:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/
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.
Patrick Warburton probably has him beat.
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.
It looks like he's using my beloved Northgate keyboard.
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.
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.
Paul Rudd’s computer (~2009?) was to me probably the most accurate prediction regarding genAI (https://youtu.be/a8K6QUPmv8Q)
>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.
1 reply →
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.
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
They are shown in the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDha7nj4s10
I read the book a few months ago and was shocked by this too.
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
I still want the Gibson towers from the movie Hackers
https://i0.wp.com/scifiinterfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
You could probably make something like that with plexiglass
Not a single mention of General Magic or Magic Cap, the software running on the tablet? Smh.
Normally you don't want to read the comments, but if you're curious about the topic please make an exception here.
No kidding! The people directly involved give plenty of background info about it. That was an interesting read.