Jurassic Park Tech

I was watching Jurassic Park tonight, and when they showed the fat guy typing away at his Mac, I saw some code on his computer screen! So I decided to pause it and see what he was coding in.

I could recognize a REPEAT, an END, and I think a BEGIN. I’m also pretty sure I saw a FOR loop somewhere in there, but I’m not sure. This looks like BASIC. Can you imagine programming something sophisticated as Jurassic Park programs in BASIC? I hope that guy was getting paid a lot of money… Not only was the system programmed in BASIC, they where running on Macs! I know I wouldn’t feel safe with T-Rexes and other dinosaurs roaming around, be controlled by BASIC programs and Macs!

Jason

was it basic? I thought I saw at one point javascript or was that another movie.

Further into the movie, it shows a much clearer shot of the code. I take back that it looks like BASIC... Now I can’t even identify it! It doesn’t look like any language really. I think they just threw some stuff in there, not thinking that somebody would pause the movie to see what it was.

I wish I could get a screen capture of it and show you what it looked like. If you have the DVD, it’s right at the beginning of chapter 10.

Jason

one thing i remember from that movie was when the fat guy was talking to somebody using his computer.

i noticed he was just talking to a video player and you can see the progress bar of the player moving at the bottom of the window.

They were running on Macs yet when the girl comes in she says "This is a Unix system, I know these" as she looks at the GUI

How does a little girl get to know a Unix system and operate it? Maybe we should hire here. Does anybody know if she has Novell experience ?

Some movies do better than others w/ tech though. In Matrix Reloaded, Trinity runs nmap and does an SSH exploit. http://www.insecure.org/nmap/nmap_inthenews.html
Beat that, Jurassic Park girl (I haven't seen the movie in a while, I forgot the characters name )

EDIT:
According to the Internet Movie database, the park software is written in Pascal, and the GUI is Silicon Graphics' "3D File System Navigator". And the girls name is Lex. Her biography does not list Novell expertise, sorry.

BTW, a couple things I remember from the book: They had a multi-Cray (3, IIRC) for the gene-sequencing, and the park systems DID run under Unix.

I just wanted to say that regarding this thread, I am proud to be a
geek!

My favorite movie scene is in Independence Day when Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith fly into the alien mothership. Goldblum whips up a computer virus on his Mac, connects it to the alien network and brings down the defense shields. I guess Apples are better since advanced life forms in other galaxies use compatible equipment.

I think the best tech movie has got to be Anti-trust!

"The Net" is the only one that really bothered me. It attempts to be realistic, unlike Hackers, which was a thoroughly enjoyable movie .

Hollywood's romance with the computer screen...

Bah, even The Net had annoying unnecessary and unrealistic graphics and sound effects (and over a modem, no less). It's as if all those CIA programmers had nothing better to do than sit around and come up with an incredible browser plug-in to do full-screen multimedia over a 9600 baud connection, all before Flash had been invented.

Really, Jurassic Park was not too far off with its treatment of computers. Far better than typical Hollywood fluff. I was under the impression that the computers with the 3D interface were in fact SGIs, which would make sense. And in fact, specialized 3D interfaces have been around for quite awhile in various branches of computing, so it's not such a big stretch to imagine that it would have been used for a high-tech park like this.

And this is from a movie that is not about computers. When Hollywood does a movie about hackers and computers, it is almost guaranteed to totally hype everything. Look at Swordfish, where the uber-hacker's method of breaking the ultimate encryption looks like a standard Winamp visualization plug-in, running on five large plasma screens. Is it hacking, or is it a rave? And think about the opening scene, when he is... um... under the gun, and starts typing away furiously at a laptop that simply shows a password entry box...

Yes, I suppose Antitrust is one of the few that treats computing fairly realistically.

I know, I should just shut up and enjoy the fun aspects of the movie, because after all, they are about escapism, right? I'm with that for some things, but sometimes I find serious treatment of a subject can be fascinating, as with movies like Lorenzo's Oil. There are some very intersting possibilities in computing that get passed over in favor of scruffy hackers frowning and typing furiously into 3D interfaces that make all kinds of beeps an gurgles.

lol, time for Annoyances.org's page on The Use of Computers in Movies. Enjoy .

Matrix Reloaded was a great example of how things are done. I think its good that the guys at Anti-trust were actually typing code and had real working code on the screens. He was even typing in Linux at one point.