Jurassic Park: the computers in every detail
Show notes
Rewatching Jurassic Park led me on a hunt for the computers that appear in the film. Dr. Hammond's island, which spared no expense, was a showcase of technology for its time: an Apple Powerbook 100 with 16MHz and 2MB of RAM, incredibly powerful SGI Indigo and Crimson workstations for 1993, and Motorola Envoy PDAs with wireless modems. For the production, Apple and Silicon Graphics lent hardware that would be worth over US$ 4 million today. But the on-screen "magic" was orchestrated by a team that fed pre-rendered graphics — created over six months — to the monitors, not by the actors. And the storage? 7GB on PLI Mini Arrays cost the equivalent of US$ 33,000, whereas today they would be worth cents. It's a vivid reminder of how quickly the perception of "cutting-edge" changes.
Why it matters: Understanding yesterday's technology shows us the speed of innovation. For builders and leaders, it's a reminder that today's 'cutting-edge' will be tomorrow's foundation — and that the perception of value can be as crucial as the actual engineering.
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