Comment by B1FIDO
16 hours ago
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.
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.
Huh, I had no idea sgi was not pc hardware. I just assumed they made PCs with their own OS
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.
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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.
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.
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.