Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
100 points by jbauer
100 points by jbauer
I remember years later I worked at and attended a small liberal arts school, and being able to use an SGI O2 was really fun in light of the movie. Before I left that school, the new president wanted us to "get rid of" our SGI lab, because he thought they were "old" and he only wanted "new" machines. We confirmed that he truly meant for us to toss them (not resell, not move to another lab, &c), and once we had that we basically just loaded up our cars with SGI equipment. I still have one, but they were and are such fun little machines.
That’s so cool. I managed to something similar at a client in the late 90s with a DEC Alphastation. Ran OpenBSD like a champ, but had fans like a jet engine.
I collected DEC and Sun equipment too! From DEC I had an AlphaStation 2100, two PWS (one 533 one 600), a Miata, a PMAX, and a MicroVAX (the last two I don't believe I ever booted). OpenBSD was also really good on Sun gear at the time, because it didn't require a serial console like NetBSD and FreeBSD did.
I do miss the old hardware's aesthetic, even if I wouldn't want to run any of it locally anymore (as you said, fans like jet engines abounded haha)
That SGI granite keyboard is a holy grail alps-style keyboard for a lot of collectors
Its unfortunate for those of us still using our SGI systems that there are so many blasted collectors.
My first 'proper' C compiler (okay DOS had one but wasn't a real OS) was on a MIPS RiscOS system, at first with a couple of terminals with wire stretched all over the building, and then arrived a desktop pizza box and a couple of Hazeltines attached to it giving me extra-special ethernet access to the 'Big Metal (i.e. Real Computers)' in the "Operations Room", where all those things were kept. I was lucky to have a terminal at home (alongside my old Oric-1 on its TV) but when that MIPS Magnum pizza box showed up, it gave me access to so much more: Local tools compatible with the operations-only remote systems, i.e. a development and debug system that could be crashed without needing to be logged by ops.
It was a grand old time of building things by the day, rather than - as we are used to it now - seconds/minutes/hours - but nevertheless, having real power on the desktop while the terminals were in use .. I built a freakin' lot of code for my customers/clients, on that thing. I learned vi and cc and threads and .. all the things I needed to write things, for big metal clients as we called them then. Great database systems, perfectly cromulent peripheral support for tape-based backups and data management.. such as it was, when these systems were high tech.
When MIPS was bought by SGI, I switched to PC's for a little while, which worked (and of course still does) but then as soon as the opportunity arose I switched back to SGI, since it was a relatively easy port of the old pizza box stuff.
I still have my pimped out Indy, an O2, and an Octane2 .. systems I've properly kept in working order, of course.
To me they are like artist notebooks, full of a legacy of years of work and interesting stuff.
I hope my grandkids get a chance to boot them up and have a root around. I for sure left them stuff in there to play with.
Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers.
Love the commitment shown here, but this is hilarious.
Perhaps tangentially related: Cathode Ray Dude (CRD) has an absolutely fascinating feature-length (2:17:15) video on how CRTs, especially those that work as computer screens, are filmed. I don't think Jurassic Park is mentioned, though.