alt Hacker NewsJurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
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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.
The circuit breaker from the restoring power scene is real too: https://www.google.com/search?q=westinghouse+spb-100&udm=2
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.
I love Jurassic Park, the movie, because it was so wildly ahead of its time in so many ways.
Also, mandatory https://jurassicsystems.com.
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.
If you like trying to identify everyday objects used as props in movies:
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.
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.
I still want the Gibson towers from the movie Hackers
https://i0.wp.com/scifiinterfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
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.
> 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.