Fabien Sanglard, a software engineer at Google, has cataloged the computers visible in the original Jurassic Park, and the list is a tidy reminder that the movie’s control room was not just blinking prop junk.
According to Sanglard’s write-up, the film shows six distinct working computers, a personal digital assistant, two large CRT monitors and a mechanical keyboard. He also identified some of the software that appears on screen, including meteorology software used to show the storm approaching Isla Nublar. Sanglard says that weather package was also used in real newsrooms at the time.
Most of the gear appears in the Jurassic Park control room, where John “Ray” Arnold and Dennis Nedry do the computing that moves the plot from expensive theme park to expensive liability event. Sanglard says the equipment was real and, in most cases, functional.
The hardware on screen
Sanglard’s inventory includes Apple, Silicon Graphics and Motorola hardware, plus storage, displays and one supercomputer façade. The main machines he identified include:
- Apple PowerBook 100, used by Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler in the mobile trailer.
- SGI R4000 Indigo, assigned to Ray Arnold in the Jurassic Park control room.
- Macintosh Quadra 700 systems, one for Arnold and two for Dennis Nedry.
- SGI Iris Crimson, used by Nedry in the control room.
- PLI Mini Arrays, external drives seen at Arnold’s and Nedry’s stations.
- Motorola Envoy PDA, associated with Nedry.
- Thinking Machines CM-5, represented in the control room as a mockup.
- SuperMatch 20-T and Silicon Graphics workstation CRT monitors at Nedry’s setup.
- SGI Granite keyboard, the mechanical keyboard used at Arnold’s station.
The money involved was very 1990s workstation money, which is to say: painful. Sanglard cites special effects coordinator Cory Faucher, quoted in The Making of Jurassic Park, saying the set could not use fake computers because audiences had become too familiar with them. Faucher said the production used $875,000 in computer hardware loaned by Silicon Graphics, $350,000 from Apple and about $500,000 in other hardware and software for the set and an off-stage control room.
That puts the equipment total at $1.725 million in 1992 dollars, or more than $4 million in current dollars, according to Sanglard’s accounting.
The Thinking Machines CM-5 appears to be the main exception to the otherwise functional setup. Sanglard labels it a mockup, and a commenter on his post described it as front panels from the supercomputer fitted with red LEDs.
The software fared better than the hardware wall dressing. Sanglard says much of what appears on screen was real software in operation. One conspicuous cheat is Nedry’s supposed video conversation with his getaway driver. Viewers have long noted that the Mac is playing a prerecorded QuickTime clip rather than showing a live security feed, with the cursor positioned over the pause control.
The result is unusually grounded film computing for a blockbuster. The Unix file system sequence still gets its share of jokes, but the hardware around it was largely the kind of expensive workstation gear that a dinosaur park’s control room would plausibly want, assuming the procurement department had survived the velociraptors.
This story draws on original reporting from Tom's Hardware.
